


Beginner's Luck

by MelanisticMoon



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anxiety, F/F, Identity Reveal, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Non-Graphic Violence, Secret Identity, Slow Burn, Swearing, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-03-07 07:09:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 45,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13429518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MelanisticMoon/pseuds/MelanisticMoon
Summary: Ladybug is Paris's lucky charm, a guardian to chase away the little misfortunes hiding under the wings of butterflies. Without the Black Cat, she carries the sole burden of their corruption.





	1. Set in Stone

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to my beta, [Miracufic](http://archiveofourown.org/users/takethembystorm) for patiently and steadfastly working his way through my tangled yarn of a first draft.

Stained glass shattered with her entrance. Marinette flew through the pane, her yo-yo clenched tightly in her fist. She hobbled the landing, one knee taking the brunt of her fall. She kneeled in a circle of light, haloed by glass. She sucked in a wavering breath. Not for the first time, Marinette wished she could fly like a real ladybug.

White butterflies fluttered like clouds across the ceiling. Sensing her presence, they startled and writhed like a single beastly creature. Marinette stood. Her shadow looked bigger and stronger than she felt.

The room outside the patch of light was dark and indiscernible. If Volpina were here, she’d be able to see into the gloom. Her hands hardened into fists.

“Ladybug,” he said. She knew his voice, that ominous baritone, without hearing it once before. The voice had haunted her dreams for months, corrupting fluffy white sheep into dark purple rams. When she woke, butterflies clung to her sheets like pale threats.

“Hawkmoth.”

The foot of his cane tapped against the polished floor. He stepped into the light, and Marinette truly saw him for the first time. His immaculate boots, sleek pants, and tapered jacket all drew the eye to one point: the brooch, dapper and shiny at his throat.

“R-re,” Marinette’s voice wavered, “Release him!”

Hawkmoth raised a brow, climbing into his chrome helmet. “I think you know how to make that happen, _Marinette_.” He strode towards her, stopping just short of the cluster of glass. He leaned forward, resting his gloved hands on the empty orb of his cane. His cold smile turned smug.

“Give me your Miraculous, or he is mine.”

 

Marinette’s backpack was moving. She balanced her box laden with pastries on one hand and poked covertly at her bag. It stopped its squirming. She clutched the strap tighter, twisting it in clammy hands.

The earrings, the _Miraculous_ , studded her ears like fluorescent bugs. Marinette stopped herself from subconsciously touching to see if they were still there. They were. Faintly buzzing, they were hard to ignore.

Miraculous. Yeah, right. If anything was miraculous, it was Marinette arriving to class before the late bell.

There was a seat open in the front row, hers. Alya sat on the adjacent seat, tapping a mile a minute on her phone. She wore a boldly-colored t-shirt of her favorite superhero, Majestia. Marinette sat down beside her, planting a sigh into their desk.

“Bad day?” Alya offered.

Marinette shrugged. How would she explain her day, if she could tell Alya? She slumped further in her seat.

Their teacher was Mme Bustier, a clean cut Parisian woman whose white jacket remained suspiciously stainless throughout the year. She sat at her desk, skimming her itinerary with a practiced eye. That usually meant that their teacher was memorizing the assignments for a group project. Inevitably, she split up tables and friends to teach “cooperation.”

Marinette wordlessly slid her box of pastries to her friend. Alya accepted one, biting into the lime green macaron with a smile. It stained her teeth a greenish hue. This close, Marinette could smell the sugar on her breath.

The classroom was warm and stuffy, and Marinette could hear Chloe jabbering with Sabrina and Adrien across the room. Chloe’s voice grated on her like bee stings and buzzing.

“Adrien doesn’t look good,” commented Alya through a mouthful of macaron.

Marinette’s head rose from her faceplant and peered at the perfectly coiffed hair of Adrien Agreste. Her indignant protest died on her tongue. He was leaning back precariously in his chair, usually vibrant expression slack, staring into nothing. Chloe’s strappy name brand sandals rested on his desktop.

Marinette was halfway across the room, catching his chair a blink before it toppled to the floor. She almost dropped it when his pretty green eyes blinked up at her in surprise. They were the color of mint, no, of soft lily pads or spring leaves.

Marinette tipped the chair upright. He was surprisingly light. Her cheeks heated up. “Sorry! I was just falling for you, I-I mean you were falling and I-” Marinette bit her lip. His face was sweaty, eyes unfocused. “Um, you look bad.”

She internally smacked herself in the face. You look bad? Because that’s how you flatter a guy you like.

“Dude, are you okay?” Nino slipped into his seat beside Adrien and touched his shoulder.

Adrien blinked. “Yeah, of course.” He turned his flawless model smile to Marinette and she almost melted. “Thanks, Marinette.”

“I-thank you, no, um-”

 _CLAAAANG_ ! _CLAAAANG_ ! _CLAAAANG_!

 

 _CLAAAANG_ ! _CLAAAANG_ ! _CLAAAANG_! The school bell screamed its familiar raucous timetable, but he was barred from obeying it indefinitely.

Ivan Bruel sat on the familiar bench outside the Principal's office. The clock struck seconds, minutes, as he kicked his sneakers against the scuffed and checkered floor. He clasped a paper tightly in his meaty hand. A bold red F taunted him from the test. He crumbled it in a fist.

_March your way right up the principal's office, young man._

He blinked back angry tears. Why was school like this? It was a cruel factory; long hours of work, thoughtless peers who didn’t want to be there any more than he did, and authority figures who punished falling behind.

It was an endless cycle; his teachers didn’t care, he was stupid and earned bad grades, he was bullied, and his parents-

Fourteen tests this month, worth a grand total of forty percent of his grade. How could failing a single test leave such a mark? It felt like a searing brand on his face, _failure_ , _stupid_ , _bully_ , and other harsher words spat from the mouth of peers.

If he could, he would close this school forever. Let the standardized tests moulder and the bricks erode. There had to be a better way.

A butterfly flew on gentle wings, the darkest purple, and landed like a baby’s kiss on Ivan’s fists. He opened his hands, and the butterfly’s tiny feet tickled his palm. It drew a reluctant smile from his pursed lips.

It fluttered to the unforgotten test, and an inky wave consumed the paper. Ivan dropped it reflexively, jolting up, but it was too late.

The anger consumed him.

  

On the way home from school, Marinette stopped at the park. A warm breeze caressed her face. The sun warmed her dark hair, and she hid from it in the protection of shady trees, sketchbook and pen in hand.

Today had been a good day. Usually saying that would jinx Marinette into her usual string of bad luck and clumsiness, but today she felt invincible.

A packed lunch from her parents made her early to class for once, Chloe hadn’t bothered her at all today, and most miraculous of all was her A score leaping from the page of the history test she struggled over last week. One of those happening would be a coincidence, but when she found a twenty euro note on the street, it became a pattern.

She should have gone straight home after classes. She _should_ have immediately interrogated the kwami that even now hid in her bag like a dangerous secret.

Her pen scraped against the pages, tearing a fine line in the paper. Why would she choose Marinette? She was an artist, a fashion designer, and a gamer. What she was _not_ was a hero. Firemen were heroes. Police were heroes. They didn’t need magic earrings or girls with a hero complex getting in their way.

Marinette’s stomach churned. She slammed the cover of her sketchbook shut. Alya. Yes, of course. Her friend was a real hero: brave and selfless, and she revered superheroes. If anyone could hold the ladybug mantle, it would be her.

Marinette stood and hastily stuffed her things in her bag. A soft squeak emanated from inside, like a plush toy being squeezed. Marinette winced. “Sorry,” she whispered. Sorry that she wasn’t brave enough.

 

She returned home, despondent, to the constant smell of bread and pastries that wafted from the glass display case and from the kitchen beyond. She breathed in the warm aroma and smiled despite herself.

She called a brief, “I’m home!” before marching up the stairs to her attic room and pushing the hatch firmly shut behind her.

Her parents’ answering greeting was muffled by the floor as well as the sounds of footsteps, clanking pots and pans, and the reliable ring of the shop bell.

Marinette trudged over to her bed, plonked down, and opened up her bag like she was ripping off a band-aid. The kwami floated out like an untethered balloon.

Tikki stretched and yawned and then blinked open her large, snowglobe eyes. “Hello again, Marinette.”

Marinette mimicked a neutral expression. Tikki implied that she had considerable power. It was probably better that she didn’t know she was being rejected until she had the distraction of a new partner.

Marinette was never good at lying. Tikki gave her a long look, said, “when you’re ready,” and helped herself to the plate of cookies conveniently placed on Marinette’s desk.

The scent of cookie dough and melted chocolate made itself at home. Marinette slipped off her socks and curled her toes in her plush rug. “What can Ladybug do?” she asked.

Through a mouthful of cookie, Tikki replied, “You are granted the power of strength and agility,” she swallowed, “and an aura of luck that aids you in conflict.”

Luck. That explained her unnaturally good day. She snorted at the irony. Of course clumsy Marinette would get the luck superpower. It probably wasn’t even enough to balance out her natural black-cat-shattering-a-mirror luck.

She dug out her smartphone from her mess of a bag and punched in Alya’s number. It went to voicemail. She sighed. Good luck, sure.

Finding Alya proved more difficult than she had anticipated. She called her friend five times before giving up and leaving a voicemail. School was over, and Alya wasn’t at home. A call to her landline and Mrs. Cesaire had confirmed it.

It was when the ground beneath Paris shook that Marinette knew something was wrong. It was a cousin to an earthquake, rattling buildings and people alike, but resounded in deep staccato waves like the footsteps of a mountain. _Thud_ . _Thud_ . _Thud_.

Her phone beeped expectantly at her, and Alya’s name popped up in its green text bubble. _Real supervillain!_ she said. And then, _That means superheroes are real 2!!!_

 _Where are you?_ Marinette sent back. Then, hastily, WHAT DO YOU MEAN SUPERVILLAIN?

 _The Louvre._ The chasing dots told Marinette that Alya was typing more, then stopped. Marinette paced her room, phone clutched tight and anxious. What if Alya was trapped somewhere? What if she was hurt? She clapped her phone against her forehead.

Paris didn’t get earthquakes. Not often enough to necessitate drills, anyway. She probably should have stayed in the relative safety of her house. The impulse to hide was strong, but Marinette pushed it aside and ran downstairs. The patisserie door’s bell rang violently with her exit.

“Marinette, where are you going?” her mother called out, but Marinette pretended not to hear. She didn’t have any answer that she liked. As she ran, her anxiety whispered chilling threats, and the street shuddered like a living thing. Marinette’s fingers twisted around the strap of her bag.

Running _towards_ a possible earthquake-cum-supervillain was the stupidest thing Marinette had attempted. What did she think she could do to help anyone? Alya was probably hurt, maybe dead, and she would be too slow, too late. She narrowly avoided throngs of people running in the opposite direction, shoving and pushing in their desperation.

Marinette gawked. Alya’s explanation of “supervillain” was vague. She was picturing a man in a cheesy earthquake-themed costume, laughing with manic glee, maybe robbing a bank. Not… not this.

The giant towered four metres tall, with skin like unworked stone. It looked like a runaway quarry, craggy features barely distinguishing it as humanoid. It shuffled like a wind-up toy soldier. Every step shook Paris.

Marinette clung to the permanency of a lamppost. Just as Alya said, a supervillain terrorized Paris. How or why were the last questions on Marinette’s mind, preceded by: where was Alya?

A scream answered her from a huddle of abandoned cars. The street shrugged, toppling branches from streetside trees and spidering cracks through shop windows. One popped and shattered, quiet in the rumble of the stone creature. It hunted the scream.

Marinette slid to her knees, still clutching the lamppost. Her teeth rattled independently. _What are you doing?_ her hindbrain protested. But that was Alya, her best friend, about to be impounded like an old car.

“It’s an akuma,” her bag gasped.

Marinette startled, then threw open her bag, uncaring who spied her secret.

“This is it, Marinette,” Tikki blurted. “The akuma, the demon, it’s turned a human into a monster. Stoneheart. You need to stop it.”

Marinette shook the bag. “What are you _talking_ about?” Her voice turned shrill.

“You can find the akuma and cure it. I can give you the power. All you have to say is ‘transform me.’”

Adrenaline surged through Marinette like an anxious wave. She stared helplessly at Alya, trapped and vulnerable, the clenched fist of the stone creature raised like a wrecking ball.

“Tikki, transform me.”

Red light shone from her ears like headlights. Her skin turned to gooseflesh as the magic surged through it. As the transformation ran its course, Marinette became Ladybug. All the courage she lacked, Ladybug had in spades, and her clumsiness morphed into grace and confidence.

“Leave her alone, bully.”

Her voice was still her own, but Tikki made Marinette sound like someone she wished she could be, a distant and future Marinette. The instinct came too, to spin her newly acquired yo-yo like she was born to wield it. She leveled a stare at the villain, the stony shell that protected and corrupted the vulnerable host within.

Marinette surreptitiously scanned the street. Heavy feet had made pock marks across the street’s skin. Cars were scattered like toys in an unkempt dollhouse.

Her first priority was Alya. Maybe Tikki could help conjure some necessary luck. She said an “aura” of luck surrounded the Ladybug. Marinette hoped that luck didn’t have a limit.

She sprinted headlong down the crippled street, footsteps thumping heavily in her mesh costume. Her yo-yo spun and hooked around the curl of a lamppost, and then she was sailing through the air.

Stoneheart raised a heavy hand, the fist perpetually clenched tight. Marinette pulled the release on her accessory, and it zipped her back to the lamp before the blow connected. She landed on the metal pole, causing it to wobble dangerously, and she ran across the length, springing from the lamp like an Olympic gymnast on a balance beam.

She hit the broad side of the adjacent shop. Gloved hands white-knuckled her yo-yo, a literal lifeline. She shimmied down the wall and behind the dangerously tilted car. Alya met her eyes, wide and hopeful at the descending superhero. Their hands met, clasped.

Marinette marveled at the ease she pulled Alya up with one hand. The girl slung her arms around Marinette’s shoulders, and together they rode the line of yo-yo from car to lamppost to safe ground.

A crater burst from the impact of Stoneheart’s fists. Marinette called back her tenuous string and ran down a nearby ally, Alya clinging to her like a spider monkey.

Stoneheart’s steps rocked the entire block. Craters burst from his feet like the impact zone of a meteorite. He tried, and failed, to enter the narrow alleyway; and when he couldn’t, he resorted to a brilliant strategy: smashing.

“Go, run!” Marinette shouted, wrenching Alya from her and ushering her further down the alley.

Alya’s glasses were askew. She nodded emphatically, shuffling away, phone still somehow clasped tight in one hand, neither lost nor damaged. She giggled, manically, but another audible footstep from Stoneheart broke her daze. She ran.

Marinette breathed in quickly. Then. Out. Slowly. Just like her counselor told her. A desperate laugh bubbled out of her throat. Who knew she would be more comfortable combating evil butterfly-automatons than combating test anxiety?

“Stoneheart!”

Brick and mortar shattered, spitting dust and debris like fire from the mouth of a great dragon.

Marinette startled, narrowly avoiding an incoming chunk of stone. She launched her yo-yo at the lip of the adjacent building and pulled herself up. Stoneheart barreled through the opened alleyway like a loose bull. The roof beneath her feet quaked.

Stoneheart was massive, invulnerable to every attack she’d landed on him. Her chest felt tight in her costume. What if she couldn’t stop it? It could and would destroy city block after block in its rampage. Alya had almost _died_.

Marinette’s muscles quivered. Alya had almost died.

“Hey, Stonebrain!” she snapped.

The behemoth turned its head to her with the shrill grinding of stones. For a brief moment, it was unmoving. A purple light haloed the rocks of its face. She startled when the creature spoke, slow and rough. “Ladybug.”

She shivered. It could talk. It knew her, or knew about her Miraculous. Her chin jutted out like a dare. “If you want to beat a superhero, you’ll have to catch me first.” And before he could answer, she was tearing across the rooftops like an untethered dog.

Instinct fueled her feet forward. She cast out her yo-yo and reeled forward. Cast and reeled. She didn’t stop to see if Stoneheart had answered her dare; she could feel the earthquakes of his steps echoing through the block and into her bones.

It felt foolish to be grateful for his pursuit. He could snap her like a twig in seconds.

The Eiffel tower dominated the sky like an angry fist. Marinette abruptly changed course. Stoneheart’s momentum carried him forward, and her foot grazed against his rough head. He grinded against the pavement in an attempt to slow himself. His feet screeched shrilly like nails against a chalkboard. The street cracked and buckled.

Marinette cursed and thanked Tikki in the same breath for her very visible, very bright costume. It painted her a red target in the sky for Stoneheart to chase. Hopefully, any nearby civilians would have the sense to stay out of his path.

Barreling through narrower streets slowed Stoneheart down, allowing Marinette to gain ground. A man with a stroller careened down the street, barely avoiding being squashed by Stoneheart’s elephantine foot. Marinette couldn't stop.

Her pulse pounded in her ears, a counterpoint to the tremors spasming up the skeleton of the building. The windows exploded into glass shrapnel. Rubble crumbled from the building like a soft cookie, rended by Stoneheart’s boulder fists. She leaped nimbly to the next roof, narrowly sticking the landing.

How could she catch the akuma? It was like trying to catch a marble on the floor of the ocean at high tide. A wave of tremors crashed into the wake of the building, and she was tumbling off the edge, caught only by the quick string wrapping around another lightpost. Her stomach was a meat grinder churning rocks.

Traffic snarled below, cars desperately reversing in vain to flee or abandoned, their people scattering from the streets like ants underfoot. Alarms blared like an asynchronous cacophony, punctuated by Stoneheart’s leonine roar. One stomp and he flattened an errant car like a pancake. A newsstand toppled from the tremors radiating outwards like high tide. It was like trying to stop a mountain.

Marinette shimmied down her line and landed before him, feet planted unstably in the quaking cobblestone street. Stoneheart wrecked a particularly noisy car, then readied another punch to an inhabited vehicle, civilians screaming shrilly inside.

Instincts goaded Marinette into a compulsive distraction. She stood her ground and yelled at the top of her lungs.

“Stop this NOW, Stoneheart. You will not-”

Stoneheart punched her fifteen blocks away with his boulder of a fist.

It felt what getting hit by a train might feel like. A crushing force to Marinette’s body pushed her through the air, flying past blurring rows of buildings and over the vehicle cemetery, until she landed heavily against the back of a storage truck. The force of her landing rocked the metal, warping and crushing in a poor cushion. Her vision blurred.

Marinette had never in her life been punched before. Not even in the la petite section, when Chloe smeared black paint over Marinette’s drawings in art class, had she ever punched or been punched.

Her face felt wet. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and it came back red with blood. She spat against the ground, took a breath, and then stood up. The pain was hazy, like looking through a long tunnel at a distant white light. With a great concentrated effort, she flipped on top of the truck and used her momentum to surface the nearest building. Fine. High vantage it was. She couldn’t hope to meet Stoneheart on his level otherwise.

Apparently losing sight of his quarry, Stoneheart lumbered up and down the street, shouting “Ladybug!” and shifting messily through rumble.

Marinette ducked under the lip of the building and caught her breath. Think, Marinette, _think_. This wasn’t one of Alya’s comic books. People weren’t supervillains because they enjoyed being evil. What was Stoneheart after?

Police sirens wailed like a tone deaf orchestra of two. Achiness danced along her ribs. One punch from this monster would kill a normal human. She barely understood why she wasn’t a bloody victim of first degree rock slide. What could a cop do? More importantly, what could _she_ do? She had a yo-yo, strength that wasn’t human, and luck, useless luck.

He was made of stone. She stifled a gasp and grinned manically, desperately. She surfaced from her hiding spot and yelled, “you missed!” and was off running again before the last word left her throat. She barely leaped clear of the answering fist.

She led him again, on a wild Ladybug chase, subtly steering him like cattle in the direction she wanted. If she could control the battlefield, maybe she had some dim hope of winning.

She ran and ran, huffing with exertion, then threw her yo-yo and sailed through the air with the force of a slingshot. She cleared several meters, landing heavily on the other side. Stoneheart was too fast, had too much momentum to slow. And when he met her friend, La Seine, the river was victorious.

Stones sank in water.

  

Stoneheart thrashed and splashed like a drowning cat, sinking under his own colossal weight. The river raged in protest. Waves rippled from his splashing fists. He roared, head barely held above the water. Then, with a rapid spray of bubbles, he sunk beneath the surface.

Marinette dived in. The water hit her like a cold shock. Her heart stuttered, and she nearly released her held breath to the Seine. She swam down. Down to the dark form of Stoneheart, barely visible in the polluted gloom.

He sunk and she followed him. A school of fish scattered and fled. Bits of refuse and algae floated through the water like dandelions in a summer breeze.

She swam to Stoneheart and held on to his arm like a remora fish attaching itself to a shark’s underbelly. He still thrashed, but the effect was lessened by the weight of the water pulling him down like an anchor. She wormed her way between the rough fingers of his massive hand and wretched it apart. In his frantic flailing Stoneheart released his grip and the akuma within.

It was a piece of paper, crumbled and wet and nearly unrecognizable. Marinette snatched it and swam away as fast she her tired legs could kick.

Lungs burning, she surfaced, and took a heavy gulp of air. She did nothing but breathe for a moment, deeply, then pulled herself ashore. Water sloughed from her suit like duck feathers.

The paper was a mushy mess in her hand. She ripped it easily.

A butterfly, dark purple in color and small in size, fluttered from the paper as if hatching from a cocoon. Was that the akuma? Marinette redrew her yo-yo and snapped the creature inside. The black dots glowed with that same inner darkness.

A fanfare of police sirens approached, wailing like a hungry toddler. The ground shook again, tremors pulsing up the bank like a anxious heart rate. She teetered, nearly falling back into the Seine. She hurried back from edge of the river as the tremors grew closer together, like counting the shrinking seconds between lightning and the answering roar of thunder.

She had to cure this akuma. Now.

Tikki was deliberately vague on the details, but Marinette’s instincts—the same instincts that turned dodging into an artform—walked her through the steps. She spun and spun the yo-yo until it was a blur of black and red, and then she released the weapon into the air.

A mighty stone fist crested the surface of the water, smashing into the bank like a child’s fist through sand. Waterfalls cascaded from his mountainous shoulders.

“Miraculous Ladybug!” The words sprung fully-formed on her lips.

The yo-yo pulsed red like her Miraculous did when she claimed it, and a wave of illusory ladybugs scattered from the source, enveloping her like a tidal wave. As Stoneheart hauled himself from the churning river, he faltered, then fell to bank like a puppet whose strings were snipped.

Marinette clutched her chest as the breath was knocked out of her and she was brought down to her knees. Her lungs burned with effort, bracing against the onslaught of magic funneling from the akuma and through her. Her hand clenched tight, and would have crushed her yo-yo to splinters if it wasn’t moulded by magic.

She breathed a punctuated. breath. in. And a long, wavering, and meandering breath out. _Steady, Marinette. You won. You did it._

 

The rocky hide of Stoneheart sloughed off him like the cracking shell of a walnut. Marinette took a cautious step forward, peering at the supervillain’s prone form.

The white (cured?) butterfly flew away, and Marinette fought the urge to chase it down and squish it under her foot.

The possessed object lay naked in her hand, a crumbled piece of paper, and she unfurled it. A bold red F braved the header. Her forehead wrinkled. Why would a failed test be a catalyst for becoming a supervillain?

Stoneheart groaned, or, whoever he was beneath the stone, chubby, meaty-handed and baby-faced, and oh god, he was just a kid. He was just a kid, no older than Marinette. Her yo-yo went slack in her hand, and thunked against the hard concrete.

“Whuh? Where am I?” the boy groaned.

Marinette strode to him and crouched down. He had a scar above his eye. Did he have that before transforming? His head craned around nervously, staring wide-eyed at the slabs of stone surrounding him like a cage. His eyes met hers, and he scrambled back along his palms.

Marinette stretched out a hand. There was dust beneath her fingernails. How did it get there?

“It’s okay,” she said, smoothing out the harsh edge that sharpened her voice. “I’m not going to hurt you. You’re safe, now.”

His hand drew haltingly from the ground. It was scraped raw from the harsh rock. He hesitated, then took her hand in his. It was clammy with cold sweat.

With her superior strength, she pulled the large boy to his feet. His gaze was cloudy, blinking at her as if awakening from trance to find himself face-to-face with a unicorn. “Who… who are you?”

Marinette gave him a tired, half-hearted smile and told him, “I’m Ladybug. What’s your name?”

“I-I.” He remembered to breathe. “Ivan.”

“Nice to meet you, Ivan. Now, it’s been a long day. Let’s get you home.”

She supported his weight across the street towards a mingled crowd of police and bold onlookers and the bulbous fish-eye cameras of reporters. Smart phones and cameras flashed blinding snapshots, and Marinette was sure she looked as tired as she felt. She lowered her gaze, saw the ripped material of her knee and the liberal gathering of dust across her suit, and scowled.

The crowd roared. Approval? It sounded like approval. Marinette gave them a smile to rival their camera flashes, and waved with her free hand.

Then, a flock of police swarmed them like bees and took Ivan’s weight from her. Ivan flinched at the contact, but seemed too exhausted to fight it. A SAMU physician wrapped a blanket around his shoulders, and Marinette let out a breath. It was over.

A ruddy-haired officer offered her his hand. It took her too long to parse his meaning before shaking it, squeezing hard. He winced.

“Sorry!” she squeaked. _There_ was timid, mousy Marinette. She had wondered what Ladybug had done with her.

“Ladybug, is it?” the cop asked.

She nodded, wondering if the cop carried Ibuprofène with him. She rubbed the back of her neck. “What can I do for you, Monsieur?”

“Would you mind explaining to me who you are and what happened to the big, er,” he puffed his chest up, “the rock monster.” It was not a request.

“It was a boy,” she gestured to Ivan, “the akuma possessed him and turned him into a monster.”

He blinked, hands on hips. “An akuma?”

A demon. An evil spirit. Corruption. That’s all Tikki said before she transformed. “Yes.”

“And you can, um, stop these akumas?”

“I’ll do everything in my power to keep Paris safe.”

The officer smiled.

Apparently passing his test, he let her pass. Marinette strode forward and put forth a last burst of energy to land nimbly on the hastily-constructed police gate separating crowd from danger. “People of Paris,” she declared, “my name is Ladybug, and I am here to protect this city!”

By the time the cheers died down, Marinette’s ears were ringing.

  

The city was quiet for awhile, and later, Marinette would be grateful for the reprieve, and longing for a time when there wasn’t an akuma attack each week.

It was a Monday, exactly two weeks from the incident, when Mme Bustier stood at the forefront of Marinette’s classroom and introduced the shy boy, Ivan, as their new classmate.

Marinette gave the boy a smile to rival the cute model across the room, and made certain his welcome (and first impression) was warm. It was time for a new beginning.


	2. Birds of a Feather

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marinette spends some quality time with Nino. Meanwhile, a new superhero debuts in Paris, Marinette unlocks a new power as Ladybug, and Adrien discovers his father’s hidden secret. 
> 
> (Trigger warning for attempted suicide.)

It was Saturday, and she was making a dress. Pins and fabrics were strewn across her sewing desk. Baubles had pinwheeled off the edge and escaped beneath the drawers.

Electronic music thumped and warped in the background, punctuated by the gentle whirr of her sewing machine.

With the last stitch in place, Marinette spun around and dramatically flourished her dress. “Well, what do you think?”

“Totally awesome, Marinette.”

Nino gave her a thumbs up and a big, cheesy grin from her pink chaise lounge. His dependable headphones were slung around his neck, and his laptop was perched on his lap, emitting steady EDM beats.

“I think maybe some feathers?” She spun the pink and black sundress. Spotted sequins winked from the waist like a belt of dark stars. “Or buttons!”

Nino chuckled. “Whatever you think, dude. You’re the fashionista here.”

Marinette snorted, and threw one of her unfinished hats at his head. He ducked, and she stuck out her tongue. “Well, I still want to know what you think.”

“It looks fantastic, Mari.”

A smile bloomed on her face. She plonked back down onto her swivel chair and spun to face her desk. Nino’s music replied a lilting violin sample. Marinette went to work on sewing the ruffled sleeves, needle lancing through the fine fabric like a steady boat through a soft sea of pinks and blacks.

“So, are you going to tell me your secret?”

Ouch! The needle pricked Marinette’s finger. She nursed the seep of tinny blood and turned to glare accusingly at her friend. “Nino,” she warned. How did he _know_? His staccato music beats raced her thumping heartbeat and lost.

Nino smirked like the cat that caught the canary. “I wonder why you’d react like that,” he teased.

“I-I don’t,” said Marinette. Nino raised a single brow. Her cheeks flamed. “I mean, of course not. Why would you think that I’m hiding something? It’s not like there’s anything to hide. What would I be hiding?”

Nino leaned forward, laptop slipping off his lap and onto her chaise. “You’re a terrible liar, dude.”

Marinette silently willed the floor to swallow her. At least Tikki was sensible enough to hide when she had friends over. Nino had no proof.

“Don’t worry, Mari. Your secret’s safe with me.”

She scoffed. “I haven’t even told you anything.”

He winked. “The secret that you have a secret is safe with me.” He dramatically mimed a zipper closing his thick lips tight, and throwing away the phantom key away.

Marinette strode across the room, picked up the “key,” and unlocked his lips. “No, no, no. Nino Lahiffe. What do you think I’m hiding?” He couldn’t possibly know. She’d been so careful.

He smiled up at her, amusement pulling at his lips. He took a long, affected a pause, and then said, “Alya thinks you have a crush on _Adrien_.”

Marinette blinked at him. Well. That was. Huh. She opened her mouth to deny it, but only empty gibberish poured out.

Nino settled back on the chaise with exaggerated casualness.

Marinette ran a mental boot up. Nino _didn’t_ know about Tikki, or her being Ladybug. That was good. Her friend was, however, under the (patently _false_ ) impression that she had a crush on the handsome model boy in their class.

“Yes.”

“Huh?”

Marinette’s lips pressed together and bit the bullet. “ _Yes_ , okay! I have a crush on Adrien Agreste.” She narrowed her eyes. “And you better not tell him.”

He barked with laughter. “Seriously? You do?”

Marinette turned her glare up ten degrees.

“Dude, of course I won’t tell. Secret, remember?” He hastily drew the key across his lips again. “I just didn’t think you’d spill that easily.”

She pouted. “Well, you asked.”

His pumping music arced a faux-grand crescendo, then tapered off. He sighed at it as if it were a terribly misbehaving child. “Gotta work on that ending.”

“Yeah,” Marinette teased, “you do.”

 

During the weekend, the patisserie thrived. The bell announcing customers rang every few minutes, welcoming them as came and went bustling with brown paper bags fulls of bread and pastries. The shop was alive with the renewing smells of fresh-baked loaves and the saccharine scent of icing.

By seven o’clock, the door was routinely locked, the downstairs lights turned off, and the lingering smell faded into scent memory. Marinette dragged herself downstairs for dinner. She blinked sleep from her eyes. After Nino left, she had taken a nap, but her head still felt like it was two sizes too heavy.

Her bed was becoming a stranger to her. Paris needed Ladybug, but the timing of her required presence was neither coordinated nor consistent. The akumas had her on her toes, wreaking havoc any day or time of the week—from a strike in the silent twilight hours of the morning to brazen attacks in broad daylight. At times, she almost believed the erratic timing was deliberate.

Marinette caught her parents’ hushed voices in conversation. She heard her name and froze to the stairs, smothering a yawn.

“She ran out by herself,” her mother said. “I thought there was an earthquake, and she just ran out the door with barely a word.”

Marinette drew a quiet breath. In the way of most teenagers who caught mention of themself, she listened closer, leaning her forehead against the cool metal of the railing. Their voices’ carried like an upside down funnel.

“Did you talk to her?” Papa asked. Paternal concern was palpable in his tone. Even in a hush, his deep voice carried.

“I was waiting to discuss it with you, first.”

“She was late to class three times in as many weeks.” A chair scraped audibly as it was dragged back into place. Marinette winced. She faked an injury in gym class, leaving early to take down a curator who animated malevolent museum exhibits. Study hall last week was ditched entirely in order to stop a cheated photographer from stealing people into white space. And the third? Marinette wracked her brain. Oh, yes. She was so exhausted from nocturnal cleaning of post-attack debris that she slept in through all of her morning classes. For the uninformed, it was a worrying pattern.

“You remember what being a teenager was like,” Mom said gently. “Maybe she has too much on her plate.”

Papa sighed. “You should talk to her, then. But if she keeps missing class-”

“-she’s grounded until we find out what’s wrong.”

Marinette scowled, slumping down onto a stair. The strip of rubber that protected people from falling down trapped dust, loose particles taking cat naps in sunbeams and invading her nostrils. She was being punished for being a superhero. Her hand tightened around the railing, and it gave a low _creak_ as it bent between her fist. She let go of the rail as if it burned her.

She shook her head, untied hair tickling her cheeks. Her parents didn’t know better. And if they did know her secret, they would probably be at least twice as unhappy with her throwing herself into danger on a weekly basis.

Marinette stood up and walked back up the stairs, avoiding the weak fifth step which always creaked under pressure. She couldn’t afford them to worry. Being grounded would make her flimsy excuses and late-night escapades even more difficult to pull off.

She pulled out her phone and sent a quick text: _Sorry, Alya. Can’t go to the mall tomorrow. 2 much hw._

 

“Don’t be bemused, it’s just the news.”

Marinette was doing homework on a Sunday.

She was at her desk, poring through a hodgepodge of notes taken by herself between frequent absences and by her friends who generously donated their copies. Fortunately (or unfortunately) they were well aware of Marinette’s now habitual lateness. Her exceptional grades were an endangered species.

The news played softly in the background, and Marinette kept one ear on the matter-of-fact voice of Mme Chamack recounting the debut of Ladybug. Marinette watched the news more this month than she ever had before, on near constant alert for an akuma attack.

“-the official debut of a second superhero-”

Marinette’s head whipped to the screen faster than a spin of her yo-yo. Tikki was already sitting on the TV stand, engrossed.

“-here now for an official press interview is the fantastic fox herself, Volpina-” _What_ . “-who only today saved Paris from the violent archer akuma, Heartbreaker.” _What_?!

The girl appeared on screen dressed neck to tail in a fuzzy orange and white costume. “As long as I am here, Paris will be safe!” she declared. Her hands, decked in long black gloves, gesticulated with every sentence.

“Tikki,” blurted Marinette, “who-”

Tikki’s eyes didn’t leave the screen. She squeaked, “The fox Miraculous.”

Mme Chamack held her microphone high to the podium, eyes hungry for the story. “Mademoiselle Volpina, what is your relation to Ladybug?”

Volpina smiled at the camera, baring the hint of fangs. “We’re allies, of course, here to save Paris from the supervillain epidemic.”

“Epidemic?” Mme Chamack questioned. “That’s a strong word for the situation, isn’t it?”

Volpina folded her arms over her chest. “What else would you call it? Some people are easily corrupted, becoming supervillains and hurting innocent Parisians. They must be stopped.”

Another antsy reporter chimed in, “Volpina, who or what is responsible for the recent influx of supervillains?”

Volpina’s tail ticked like a restless pendulum. “Someone stole something that didn’t belong to them. The akumas, the butterflies that infect people, they have a master.” Her eyes dug into the camera. “But he isn’t as strong as I am,” she promised.

There were more questions, more answers. Marinette watched the screen, nails digging white crescents into her hands. They played a rerun of the televised fight, Volpina a fire in action, facing a winged akuma called Heartbreaker and grounding him. The fight cut off before she could see what happened to the akuma.

Marinette turned an accusing stare at Tikki. “ _Fox_ Miraculous, Tikki?”

“Don’t trust fox news.”

“Tikki!”

“Okay, Marinette. I didn’t tell you about the fox because I thought it was lost.” She floated between Marinette and the _Eau De Parfum_ commercial now possessing the tv. “And before you ask, I don’t know who has it now.” Her forehead creased with worry lines. “The Great Guardian would have told me if he had recovered another Miraculous.”

Marinette scowled. She put a pin in ‘Great Guardian’ and clarified, “So Volpina must have discovered it recently.”

“There is no way to know where or how long it has been hiding. I have not spoken to the kwami of the fox in over three decades.”

Tikki was talking around corners like a minotaur tiptoeing through a labyrinth. Marinette put away her geography homework with a sigh. There was a part of her that hoped this was a good sign. A second superhero would mean there was someone to pick up the slack when Marinette’s arms were full with school, fashion, and her responsibilities as class representative. Or even someone to belie any connections between Marinette and Ladybug.

Right now, her suspiciously timed disappearances during akuma attacks were held up by cardboard excuses. An impulsive transformation could waste all the care she put into hiding her identity. Volpina’s presence meant there was now a second hero to divvy up the limelight.

Marinette raised her fists in determination. “Tikki, spots on!”

Tikki buzzed in her familiar whirlpool of red warning lights, possessing and powering Marinette’s earrings. The suit crawled up her skin like an afterthought. Marinette tossed a hand through her hair and her spotted mask and red ribbons flashed on.

The tv droned on. She flexed her hands, pulling at the tight material of her costume.

“It’s fox season.”

 

Unfortunately, finding one person (whose true identity was unknown) in a city of over two million people was one massive coincidence away from impossible. The scene of the news broadcast was long empty by the time she arrived, and left no clues to where Volpina might have gone.

She climbed up the arcing beams of the Eiffel Tower like a spider ascending her web. Paris stretched out beneath her like an ocean of civilization—all blinking lights and people that looked like ants from this height. The chill wind blew her pigtails about her face. She held herself up by one arm, precariously suspended above the city. Marinette closed her eyes and laughed.

She had ascended it before when she was little, hand-and-hand with her parents as a buffer on either side of her. The whole way up the lift she kept her eyes tightly closed. It wasn’t until they reached the observation deck that she dared to open them. It made little Marinette feel like a bird, her limited view of the world laid out beneath her.

She opened her eyes. Now she could scale the entire building with her bare hands and a yo-yo.

The sun made long shadows from the tower, drawing a dark mark below and reminding her time had passed. She had scoured the city in a wide radius around the pavilion. With Tikki’s granted agility, she covered the city herself in less time than it would have taken riding overcrowded public transportation. Yet Volpina remained elusive.

Marinette stepped onto a horizontal  support beam and leaned against the tower, idly walking the dog with her yo-yo. It had been four hours, and she had homework to do. This wasn’t how she wanted to waste her weekend. Then again, she wasn’t really looking forward to the homework either.

Her yo-yo swung up and hit her head in a lapsed moment of concentration, and Marinette winced. She reeled in the misbehaving toy and creeped to the beam’s edge. Pigeons cooed and splashed in a fountain. People gathered in the park, children flying kites, and joggers making laps around the field. In the distance, the paralyzed spines of streets—the craters of Stoneheart’s footprints remained—drew construction workers like flies to roadkill.

Marinette rubbed her arms, feeling the sudden chill of the high altitude air. This was a waste of time.

A woman screamed.

Marinette froze.

The shattering of glass, the clap of a gunshot, and Marinette jolted to her feet. She leaped up and over the beam of the tower before even processing her decision to act. Her yo-yo hooked a lamppost and swung her like a pendulum across the street.

A scarred hole gaped like a mouth from the glass face of a boutique window. Marinette sprinted into the store, caution dimming in the back of her mind.

She slid to a halt. Two men in black masks gestured with shotguns. They turned to her as she entered. Men and women lay face down on the ground. Marinette’s mind blanked before catching the telltale absence of blood or bullet holes. One stirred. She gasped in relief.

“Get down on the ground, now!” a gunman screamed.

Marinette resisted the urge to obey the angry man. She lifted her chin, shoulders back, putting on a false veneer of confidence. “Put the gun down,” she ordered. She was proud of how level her voice sounded.

“Oh shit,” the other man said, youth and shock coloring his voice, “it’s Ladybug!”

A man on the ground lifted his head to look, and the shotgun’s snarling muzzle turned on him. “I said, stay _down_!”

The hostage shakily complied.

Marinette took a breath and held her hands up placatingly. The other sneaked to her weapon. These weren’t mind-controlled akumas irresponsible for their actions; they were violent criminals who _chose_ to hurt people. She felt the sudden need to spit.

“Put down your weapons, and turn yourselves in,” she said. There was no acceptable compromise.

“Do you think-”

“No,” the man barked. He backed away, gun pointed at her as his other arm hooked a line of purses from their table. They were purple with black trim, marked with the florid signature of Gabriel Agreste. She didn’t need to be a fashion designer to know their value. He quickly shoved the purses into a duffel bag, dropped it, then kicked it over to his accomplice, all without lowering his gun. The younger man bent to pick up the bag.

It was like time slowed down. Marinette grasped his gun with her yo-yo and pulled tight. It sailed towards and past her, clattering to the ground like a toppled over chair. She ran at him, landing a powerful kick to his stomach.

He howled, clutching his midsection, and sunk to the ground. Tears sprang from his exposed eyes, but Marinette couldn’t waste time feeling guilty for hitting a normal human so hard. She cast her yo-yo again. The second gunman pivoted, shot.

The gun rained bullets like a raucous hailstorm, deafening Marinette and her enhanced senses. She ducked and pressed her fists to her ears. Her yo-yo hit the floor. Bullets exploded into the back wall, shattering glass display cases into airborne shards. Someone screamed.

Marinette ducked and rolled forward. She surged up and grasped the gun, warm and clicking under her hand, and twisted. The hot metal bent like cheap silverware. She grimaced and pulled her hand away. It stung as painfully as when she had once burned her hand on the oven in her eagerness to bake alongside her parents.

She gritted her teeth against the tightening sensation in her throat. A roundhouse kick to the head knocked the disarmed gunman out cold. His head slammed to the ground with a crack, and she looked away. These were people—not super durable akumas—she reminded herself.

“What’s going on!?” shouted a third voice, female, and another armed robber appeared from the back of the shop, arms laden with luxury purses and a small cash box tucked under her arm.

Marinette channeled her adrenaline into a powerful swing of her yo-yo. She winced as the string dug into her hands. The yo-yo headbutted the woman between the eyes. She wavered, dazed, and Marinette landed a punch to her throat, catching her gun as she dropped it. She snapped it in two.

She was breathing like the climax of a panic attack, and sounds were distorted like she was hearing them from underwater. There were sirens though, distant, coming closer. Bodies lay unconscious (God, she hoped they were all unconscious) around the boutique. Bullet casings and glass littered stands of couture purses and bubbly advertisements.

Marinette clutched her hands to her chest, and tiptoed through the minefield of debris. Someone grabbed her arm, and she whipped around, ready to deck them in the face.

“Thank you, Ladybug.”

It was a man with pink earrings and shaking hands. He pulled away and smiled weakly. Marinette smiled back. “You’re welcome.”

When the police arrived, she told them what happened. Most seemed grateful. A woman, one of the hostages, tearily introduced her son to Ladybug, and Marinette greeted the boy warmly. The robbers were carried off in police custody. She tried not to feel satisfaction at seeing them hauled away in cuffs.

No one was hurt, miraculously.

There was the good luck Tikki had promised. She finally felt it, pouring off of her and into the bullets that grazed her, the ones that missed their targets altogether, and the desperate blows that she had landed. The luck felt like a tangible force around her, one she could bend to her needs. Now, she felt like a lake drained to a meager puddle.

She could not rely on luck forever.

 

On her way home, she felt a pair of eyes on her back, a disturbance in her harried senses. She spun around, but no one was there. Was it an akuma? Maybe one who could turn invisible. She tightened her grip on her yo-yo.

 _Clap_ . _Clap_ . _Clap_.

Marinette turned around again and was frozen for a moment before recognition set in. The tall, costumed girl prowled across the rooftop in her oranges, blacks, and whites, baring literal fangs that could make a lion shiver. Marinette loosened her tense grip.

“Volpina.”

“Nice to finally meet you, Ladybug.” Volpina smirked over. Her voice was stentorian with the severe edges filed down. “I heard about how you took down those thugs, and tracked you down.”

“That just happened a few hours ago.” She must be as much of a newschaser as Marinette.

Volpina offered a handshake, and Marinette accepted it, stifling a wince from her burns.

“It’s so great to meet you,” said Volpina, a faint blush splashing across her beige cheeks. “You’re my hero.”

Marinette rubbed the back of her neck. “Thank you. I, uh, try my best.” She shifted her weight from foot to foot, weighing probing questions against tired platitudes. She settled on, “So, you’re a superhero, too?”

Volpina nodded eagerly. “I am Volpina, the Fox of Paris.”

“Ladybug.” She blushed. “But you already knew that.”

Volpina laughed. It was sharp like a dog’s bark.

“So, what did you want to talk about?” Marinette asked.

“I’ve been waiting forever to meet you, another Miraculous holder.”

“Well, here I am.” Awkward bumbling and all.

“You know, I’ve met Miraculous holders before, but none like you.”

Now, hold on. “What?”

“The last Ladybug lived in Korea, did you know? And the Black Cat from America.”

Marinette’s mind lagged with the stream of new information. “How did-”

“Trixx knew them then, of course, even Hawkmoth, whoever the bastard is.” Volpina’s voice was sharp as her teeth.

Marinette thought of the akumas, corruption laden in their butterfly (and then human) vessels. They were not Miraculous, only a pale imitation. Maybe they weren’t even butterflies, just a mimic in butterfly’s colors? Indignation rose in her chest at Volpina’s apparently chatty kwami. “Did your kwami tell you that?”

“She tells me what I ask of her.”

“And what about protecting our identities? You wouldn’t tell that, would you?” Her mask—irremovable, she’s tried and failed to take it off—itched.

Volpina waved the question off with a gesture. “I don’t care about that. Trixx gives me the power to fight. I don’t need secrets when I have claws.” She demonstrated them, pointed edges sharp as knives. “Oh, and this.” She grinned as a bold streak of white rippled through her brown hair. “Illusion.”

Okay, Marinette had to admit that was pretty cool. Better than unreliable and vague “luck” even.

“Tikki says that we shouldn’t reveal our true identities because it could endanger our loved ones.”

“Do you do everything your kwami tells you?”

Marinette gritted her teeth, but recalled Tikki’s noticeable distrust of questions, each met with abrupt insistence that secrecy was essential. She never even mentioned other Miraculous holders or kwamis or fricking _Hawkmoth_.

She tapped her chin. “Maybe you’re right. There _is_ a lot that she doesn’t tell me,” she said reluctantly, but it felt something like a betrayal of confidence.

“See, that’s what I mean. _We’re_ the superheroes. If we’re risking our lives fighting villains, we deserve to know what we're up against.” She posed heroically and clenched a triumphant fist. The wind assisted her, dramatically blowing her long hair and tail. “But it’s worth it. I’m a hero. _We_ are heroes! And if we fight together, no supervillain can beat us.”

She made it sound so simple, a clear white line drawn between superheroes like them and villains.

Tikki and Trixx—and whoever other kwamis there were—saddled them with their powers like a teacher giving out a final test with no forewarning or time to prepare.

She was doing fine now, but Tikki couldn’t counsel her in the mask. She had to rely on quick thinking and providence. Could she trust another partner, one who could fight beside her in battle? Marinette hoped this was the right choice.

“Happy to have the help,” she said.

Volpina grinned and said, “this will be fun. I can see the headline now: Volpina and Ladybug finally team up!”

The sun peeked out from the clouds and blushed. Pigeons cooed in noisy clusters around the roof, uncaring of the two superheroes loitering there. Why not have a partner? With Volpina, maybe she could stop the akumas instead of desperately purifying host after host, curing the illness instead of easing the symptoms. The idea settled in her mind like sediment on a riverbed, and Marinette traded eager grins with Volpina like zealous kids with crayons.

“Let’s get started.”

 

Despite the enthusiastic genesis of their partnership, Marinette and Volpina found no more akumas that day. It seemed that even the butterflies’ master couldn’t use his Miraculous relentlessly. That was a small comfort.

They parted ways, entering their numbers into each other's phones and agreeing to search again. Marinette worried that giving out her personal number may not have been the safest plan, but there was no alternative. She could hardly afford to go out and buy a new phone for use only as a Ladybug.

Nevertheless, it was good to be proactive. There was always a lag between the birth of an akuma and how long Marinette could respond to it. Bank robbers were not akumas, of course, but if she was going to be Ladybug, Marinette would do it on her own terms. Even if that meant harassing her kwami into revealing more details about her abilities.

Marinette knew that she was stronger, faster, and more agile than peak humanity, but there were still powers left to discover. Volpina was right; she did deserve to know.

“Tikki.”

The kwami buzzed like the insect she personified, floating from leaf to leaf. Marinette placed her hands on her hips and leveled a look at Tikki’s back. Her kwami knew the accusation burning Marinette's tongue, but played at ignorance.

“What the heck, Tikki? More Miraculouses! Why didn’t you tell me about this?” Marinette paced the hexagonal perimeter of her veranda.

Tikki twirled around like a lazy globe. She sighed. “You weren’t ready to know.”

Marinette resisted the urge to screech. Her hands balled into fists. “That doesn’t even make sense!” Her voice carried off the roof. She lowered it to an indignant whisper, “How am I supposed to stop akumas if I don’t even know what they are?” Marinette resumed pacing. “Volpina even knew about ‘Hawkmoth.’ _Her_ kwami must have told her.” Hearing and hating the childish petulance in her own voice, she pursed her lips.

Tikki flew up into her path. Marinette stopped and scowled. “I’m sorry, Marinette,” Tikki said, “I didn’t want to stress you any more than I already have.”

Marinette was weak to those big, blue eyes. She closed her own and counted to ten, then opened them again. “If we’re going to do this, Tikki, we need to be honest with each other.”

Tikki nodded. “Of course.” She floated over and alighted on the balcony railing. To an onlooker below, she might look like a particularly fat bird or a hairless cat.

“There are many kwami in the universe,” she began. She looked down at her tiny, stubby hands. “We personify emotions, ideals: creation, love, beauty. The conception of such an idea births a kwami. In the past, we traveled the universe, invisible and unknowable to other beings.

“The Miraculous were created to anchor seven of us to the mortal plane. In turn, we shared with them our power. We chose humans as champions to protect the world from evil, but sometimes our hosts used our power for their own selfish gain.” Her eyes drew up then, looking through Marinette. “I fear that is what happened to Nooroo, the kwami of the butterfly.”

Marinette slid down into a patio chair, hands clenched against the armrests. “Did you know Nooroo’s... champion?”

“After my last chosen, I-” She shook her head. “I was dormant for several years.” She chuckled ruefully. “It has been a short time, for a kwami. Most of us have been alive for eons.”

Marinette blinked. _Eons_. She knew that Tikki was powerful, but that word put it into perspective. Her kwami could talk for the rest of Marinette’s life and still not be able to tell her everything.

The flowers slept snugly in their beds, their leaves stirring to the wind. A ladybug, a lucky little symbol, crawled vibrant spotted red against the dark dirt. Tikki floated over, and it lighted on her hand.

“The butterfly Miraculous gives the power of empathy. Nooroo connects their champion to the minds and hearts of the people, and chooses the strong of will to champion their cause. Those akumas are who you are facing now.”

The ladybug spread its wings and took flight. A cold stone settled in Marinette’s stomach, and she held her earring like a touchstone. It was cool to the touch, lowly buzzing like a hornet in her ears. She could feel the luck flowing through it as a tangible force.

“And, Ladybug’s luck?” Marinette asked. There was the sense memory of adrenaline in her heart. She leaned forward, resting her hands on her bare knees. “Today, when I fought those bankrobbers, I felt-” Words slipped backwards off her tongue and she swallowed them. She could hardly describe the feeling.

Tikki’s big eyes looked sharply at Marinette. “Are you sure?”

She nodded mutely, hands balled into loose fists. Of course Tikki knew what she meant.

Tikki looked into Marinette’s eyes for a long stretch of time, as if peering into a crystal ball. Finally, she nodded. “Okay, Marinette. Maybe you are ready.” She floated over and tapped her earring, and Marinette giggled. “Let me teach you _Lucky Charm_.”

Marinette shivered. When Tikki said those two words, it felt like the air around was charged, like a spell was being cast. It awakened the sensation in Marinette’s belly, an indescribable force, and tugged at it. Marinette whispered them back, almost afraid to commit it to words. The more she focused on the feeling, the stronger the feeling grew, spinning her head. Her heart pounded against her chest.

It was Miraculous.

 

It was a warm sunny day, and he was panhandling in the Trocadéro. He huddled in the relative shade of a sculpture. Wind cooled as it picked up water from the oblong pool centering the park. People walked past him, placing coins in his cup without sparing him a glance; however, most were more comfortable pretending that he didn’t exist at all.

“Change, please?”

Singling them out usually garnered a saccharine lie. “Sorry, left my wallet at home,” they said, licking on an ice cream they had bought, still unmelted. Acknowledging him as human made people uncomfortable.

Xavier sighed. He stowed his meager earnings for the day and pulled out a bulk bag of seeds. He could afford one only so often, but treating his avian friends made him smile. A day of begging was worth a smile.

He threw a handful of seeds at the feet of the fountain. Then, he pulled out his bird whistle, a precious gift from a friend at the shelter, and blew it. It made a soft _cooing_ noise _._

An answering storm of _coos_ and unkempt feathers swarmed the offering. Fat, happy pigeons dived for the seeds as if it were their final meal. The scrawnier ones circled the fringes, darting in to take their fill. Some fought, squabbling and pecking for a few seeds. Xavier rolled his eyes and shooed the larger ones away.

A few pigeons he liked to think he recognized lighted near him. One landed on his holey hat, another two resting by his feet. Their feathers may be gray and ragged, but their necks shone with flecks of iridescent pinks and greens. One lost a feather, and he snatched it, giving it a place of honor on his hat.

He threw more seeds, and a familiar pigeon with black wings landed on his arm like a bird of prey would perch on a falconer’s glove. He smiled. “Edgar, you fancy one.” He bounced his arm and Edgar jumped.

“Scram, you winged rats!”

The pigeons fled en masse, shooed away by the deliberate, stomping steps of a man in uniform. Xavier shrunk instinctively. Did he do anything to provoke him? His mind scrabbled. He was here legally, he had asked Shannon who volunteered at the shelter, and she was a law student. He plastered on a smile and said, “How can I help you, sir?”

“No. Feeding. The Pigeons!” The man blustered, towering over Xavier with hands on his hips. “It’s strictly forbidden. You are dirtying up this park with their waste.” There was no mistaking the implication that _he_ was also seen as ‘dirtying’ the public space with his mere presence. The pigeons were an easy excuse.

The man invaded his personal space, lip curling in disgust, and yelled, “Get out!”

Xavier flinched and shrunk closer to the fountain, avoiding eye contact with the hostile authority figure. “Yes, sir.” He gathered up his things, which were few, and retreated like an alley cat after a lost fight. He left his park, his pigeons.

The feeling of injustice was easy prey for the akuma. The butterfly turned justified anger and desperation into a weapon to wield against Xavier’s oppressors—and, of course, Ladybug.

Hawkmoth whispered in his mind. “The park keepers and police officers abuse their power to hurt people like you. They deserve to know what it feels like to be afraid.”

 

Volpina got her promised team up much sooner than Marinette anticipated.

The sight of pigeons in Paris wasn’t unusual, but this hive-minded flock targeted specific victims in a pattern that couldn’t be coincidental. The mainstream news had yet to comment on it, but the reliable _Ladyblog_ wondered if it was related to akuma activity. Marinette was prone to agree with Alya’s hunches, or at least investigate them further.

Apparently, pigeons could become akumas, too. What finally broke their spirits, she could only guess. A lack of birdseed? Hostile architecture? Maybe a particularly vicious cat?

What she did know was: getting beaten by pigeons? Humiliating.

A flurry of wingbeats crescendoed in the air. The stinking, cooing birds struck Volpina with their sharp beaks. She shouted in pain, fruitlessly brandishing her flute like a staff. For every bird she batted, two more caught her off guard.

Marinette gritted her teeth and launched herself into the fray. Her yo-yo swung in a close arc, whipping the air around her and Volpina.

 _Thunk_. _Thunk_ _Thunk_.

Pigeons dropped like swatted flies. Marinette spun, waving her yo-yo like a spinning propeller. Volpina twirled clockwise with her flute, her back to Marinette’s.

The pigeons cooed indignantly, but dispersed. “Thanks, partner.”

Marinette relaxed her arm. “Of course, Volpina.”

Volpina swiped wet bird droppings from her shoulder, mock-growling when it stuck to her gloves. Her ears flattened. “So much for a first impression.” She wiped her soiled gloves against the grass, sticking out her tongue.

Marinette put a hand on her shoulder. “You already beat one akuma. Together, there’s no question we’ll beat this one, too.”

Volpina’s ears perked up. “So, tell me how we’re going to beat a flock of flying rats.”

The pigeons flew towards the Trocadéro, where the flock had originated. Park keepers had gone missing since the attacks started. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

“Someone has a grudge.”

She raised an eyebrow. “ _Pigeons_ have a grudge?”

She was right. Someone, the real akuma, must be controlling them.

“Let’s follow them and find out.”

The flock led them on a wild pigeon chase across the Trocadéro. There was seemingly no pattern to their tactical strikes, except the targets. Another was there and gone before the pair could even process the airplane formation of pigeons bombing themselves from the sky. Marinette and Volpina barely managed to save the civilian and escape, making a mad dash across to safety.

Marinette fireman-carried the ranger to a nearby museum, depositing her safely inside. Volpina slammed the door shut behind them, and the dumb animals thunked against the transparent glass. They stayed outside, congregating like lions stalking cornered prey.

The museum was brightly lit and boasted grand, frescoed ceilings. Some Parisians had sought shelter here, clustering on upholstered benches or in the annexed cafeteria. Marinette steered the ranger, who was shaking like a leaf, to an empty seat.

Volpina clutched her flute staff like a bat. She glowered at the pigeons lying in wait. “Time for round two?”

“No. We have to be smart about this.” She paced the squeaky polished floors. Some people, noticing them, pointed and chattered. She caught an unsubtle camera flash or three. “We could fight pigeons all day and never find the akuma.”

Akumas were not usually so elusive. Each other so far had been big, loud, or both. She circled back to her usual question: what did the akuma want? There was a motive at the heart of every akuma—single-minded though it was—a twisted emotion rooting their actions. Striking that motive was like hitting an exposed nerve, a weak point.

“They’re not killing anyone.”

“What?”

“The pigeons, they’re not killing anyone. They’re _taking_ people.

“Hostages?” Volpina relaxed the iron grip on her flute. Marinette hadn’t seen her actually play it yet; she treated it like a bludgeoning weapon. “They would have to be taking them somewhere, though. Close enough to the park to circle back.” She snapped her fingers. “Ah! We’ll just lay some bait, and follow them to the supervillain.”

Marinette bit her lip. “We can’t put citizens in danger.”

Volpina strode over to the rescued park ranger, grinning like a sly fox, and walked a semi-circle around her, looking her up and down. She cleared her throat, then said, “Just need to borrow you for a moment,” but her voice was not her own. It was a mimic of the ranger’s.

Volpina pulled out her flute and played a few notes. The music was lilting and serene. She played it like she was born with a flute in her hands. “Mirage,” she said.

The ranger startled as Volpina changed before their eyes. Her distinctive tail and ears shrunk from sight. Her features morphed from tan skin and ample nose to white and petite, and her striking costume shifted to a forest green uniform. She was a perfect copy of the park ranger. She turned to Marinette, tipping her illusory cap. “Just an ordinary park ranger, don’t mind me.”

Marinette laughed. Okay, that would work. That would definitely work.

 

The pigeons took the bait. Volpina played the role of a panicking victim perfectly, tripping over air, and allowing them to swoop in and steal her. Marinette followed the bizarre sphere of pigeons carrying her away with their combined might.

They flew her to a rooftop garden, and there were the missing rangers, trapped in an aviary. Their green jackets and hats made them blend with the dense foliage inside. The pigeons threw Volpina to the roof, then pushed and prodded her inside the cage. Marinette hid under the lip of the roof.

 _Coo_ ! _Coo_! “Good work, my pretty pigeons. Those rangers won’t be taking advantage of their authority any more!”

Marinette did a double take. She smothered a bubbling laugh with her hand. He was dressed as a pigeon, decked head to tail in pink, gray, and white feathers. Short wings extended between his arms, and he strutted about like his birds. This had to be the most ludicrous akuma yet, and belied the seriousness of the situation.

He strutted over to the aviary and locked it shut. He glowered at the rangers, who cowered to the center of the cage.

One of his pigeons landed on his shoulder, and cooed softly in his ear. His eyes locked on to her. “Ladybug- _coo_ -get her!”  

So much for cover. Marinette pulled herself onto the roof and was immediately met by a wave of incoming pigeons. Fighting them was like fighting the high tide—she was swept off balance by the force.

Crashing to her knees, Marinette covered her exposed face with her arms. The pigeons pecked mercilessly at her back, barely protected by her costume. She closed her eyes and rolled out of their path, then leaped to her feet as quickly as she could.

She scrambled for her yo-yo and spun it a wide circle, tripling its speed to lethal. It spun an answering gale to the pigeons, pushing them back, some plummeting with bruised and tender wings, grounded.

Before they could recuperate—and their master could rally them to strategy—Marinette hooked her weapon around a bar of the cage and pulled. The metal lurched and groaned. With another tug and strain of strength, the door bent free. Her partner took the cue to hurdle through the opening, shedding her illusion like a jacket on a warm day.

With her fox costume bared once more, Volpina smirked like the fox in the henhouse, surrounded on all sides by fat pigeons. “The akuma’s in his whistle!” she informed her. “I saw him using it to control the pigeons.”

Marinette squared her jaw and nodded, a plan already forming in her mind. She ran over to Volpina and pivoted, slamming her back into Volpina’s. It was easier being in two places at once when she had a partner at her back. Her yo-yo was already spinning another improvised fan to shield the brunt of the flock.  “I’ll keep the pigeons off of you. Get the akuma!”

Volpina needed no second command. She dropped to all fours and raced at the Pigeonman like an animal, a growl tearing through her throat. The pigeons, catching the movement, swarmed her, but Marinette was ready this time. She batted them away like leaves caught in a lawnmower’s blades, and winced at the bloodied feathers. They were only birds, she told herself.

A great yowl sized the air behind her. Marinette half-turned to see Volpina in action. Her claws raked across Pigeonman’s nose, culling a spatter of blood and feathers. He shrieked and clutched at his face. The other hand blew and blew at his whistle and it cooed a warbling command.

Marinette froze mid-action. Her yo-yo released tension and clonked her directly on the head. She winced. Volpina was adrenaline and grace siphoned into to the fight. Maybe a bit _too_ into it.

The pigeons took advantage of her lapse, descending on her like a swarm of locusts. She renewed her whirlwind of yo-yo tricks, careful to keep them distracted and away from Volpina.

 _Coo_ ! _Coo_! Pigeonman’s whistle called his avian minions to defend him. They surrounded him like living armor, swarming and blocking Volpina’s blows. A beak cut her cheek and she growled. The pair fought close quarters, beak against claw. Marinette struggled to bat the pigeons away without hitting Volpina.

She ran at them, barely getting out the word—“duck!”—before launching her yo-yo at and around Pigeonman’s feathery and nebulous form and pulling him towards her. He resisted, but she was stronger, and he tripped over Volpina’s prone form.

Volpina’s hand darted into the mass of pigeon talons and beaks and pulled from it the akuma-hiding whistle. She yowled as the pigeons tore her arms to bloody ribbons, scrabbling backwards across the pavement. She snapped the whistle in half, and the dark butterfly fluttered out. Volpina watched it with wide eyes.

Marinette wasted no time in capturing it. Without their master to control their minds, the pigeons didn’t care to stop her. She spun her yo-yo a lazier version of her feather-splitting fan and sent the butterfly flying into the clouds. “Miraculous Ladybug!”

Fear enveloped Marinette as a cage, flighty bird heart squawking in her chest. The police sirens wailed in the distance like the tantrum of a toddler, and an express train of fear raced up her spine. It took her thoroughly-adopted breathing exercises to stop herself from bolting like a wild animal.

Volpina was all bared teeth and confidence. She crawled to her feet and reached the host of Pigeonman. The mass of pigeons scattered at her looming shadow, revealing the man beneath.

He was frail, bruises bright as paint beneath his ragged clothes, and matted brown hair stubbornly grew from his oily scalp. He stared at Volpina—her jagged teeth and swagger—with wide eyes. Marinette saw her own fear in him and pulled Volpina back.

Hurt flashed briefly across Volpina’s face before she studied her expression. She took a step back, sinking to all fours.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” Marinette assured the man. It was a decreasingly necessary appeal as more Parisians learned about Ladybug. It was strange that he would fear her still. She maintained a careful distance from him.

He rose, then took a step back, dangerously close to the roof’s edge. The sirens drew closer, and he flinched.

Marinette raised her hands in supplication. Her words were quick and empty. “Please, monsieur, you’re safe here.”

“Ladybug,” Volpina warned. Her tail swished in Marinette’s periphery, but her eyes were locked with the man.

“I’m Ladybug,” she said softly. “What’s your name?”

“Xavier,” he said, the first word uttered without the harsh, ridiculous edge of a coo.

“Okay, Xavier. Let’s get you home.”

Xavier took another step back. His left foot straddled the edge between roof and empty air. His hands were shaking like hung laundry in the wind.

“Stay back,” he pled.

She stayed. Her heart fluttered like a tiny bird in her chest. It told her her to take flight, that she was not safe here, exposed on a roof with the cops in pursuit. Marinette tamped down on the artificial fear—it was not her own, and she had enough experience with anxiety to know that it was not logical. This must be the akuma, still fluttering in her blood after cleansing it. She had a sudden and terrifying urge to cut it from her veins.

“I know you’re afraid,” she said softly. “It’s okay to be afraid.”

“I have nothing to lose,” he said like it was a foregone conclusion. “I am nothing, I am nobody.” He took a long step out onto the lip of the roof’s edge, and Marinette swallowed her heart. Red and blue police lights lit up the whole block, painting Xavier in silhouette and making bright collisions on his tattered jacket.

No, no, NO! They weren’t helping things, their presence was only making things worse! Marinette breathing quickened as she wracked her mind for a way to talk Xavier down from that final, terrible choice.

She was too afraid herself to function. She didn’t understand. When Ladybug purified the akuma, she thought that it cured the corruption, taking it into herself so its victim would be purged of it entirely. And yet the underlying emotions, the reasons Xavier was akumatized in the first place were still there. They may have _always_ been there, lurking beneath the surface like bacteria that turned deadly when exposed to the air. With any luck-

Oh, yes. How very _stupid_ Marinette! She wasted no time smacking herself for forgetting her lessons in her fear, and drew up the luck that ran through her veins like streams of liquid gold. If ever there was a time to use her power, it was now.

“Lucky charm,” Marinette muttered beneath her breath. The words rose and fell on her tongue like a nervous tenor practicing their scales. “Luckycharmluckycharmluckycharm.” She didn’t care that she could only use her power once, she wasn’t taking any chances that she got it wrong the first time.

A pigeon rose from the body flock of injured birds, cooing softly and limping over to Xavier with a wing tucked uncomfortably to its side. _Coo_ ! _Coo_!

Xavier let out a soft gasp. His eyes widened, then his face crumpled like wet cardboard. He stepped towards her, no, towards the pigeon, bending down to his knees to welcome the dirty bird into his arms and cradle it like a baby. “Oh, Edgar,” he whispered. “That _is_ you! I could recognize those dark feathers anywhere.”

Marinette let out the long breath she had been holding. Her pulse thundered in her ears. She slowly lowered herself to crouch at Xavier’s level, and spoke to him as if coaxing a startled animal. “Xavier, may I please help you down, now?” When he cradled Edgar to his chest with wide eyes, she hastened to add, “with Edgar, of course. You can keep him close.” She eyed the pigeon, peering out from between the folds of Xavier’s arms. “But his wing is broken, and we need to you both some help. Okay?”

Xavier sighed like it was his last breath. He sounded as tired as she felt, but nodded, slowly. “O-okay.”

“We’re okay.”

 

Adrien’s day went from okay to miraculous in the span of an hour. It seemed to be a catalyst, finding his father’s secret safe in his atelier. Hiding beneath his desk, Adrien’s face perspired with unease as his father punched in the six-digit code: 2-8-1-0-1-6.

Father’s designer shoes clinked crisply against the checkered chessboard tile as he left. He yelled down his cell, “you imbeciles couldn’t even get the orders right!” The door slammed shut behind him.

Adrien waited until Father’s footsteps faded beyond earshot. Then, he crawled out from under the desk and stared at the ten foot tall portrait of his mother adorning the atelier wall. Sweaty palms pried the painting open, and it swung on concealed hinges.

His hand rose to type in the key, then stopped. Was his father paranoid enough to check his safe for fingerprints? Adrien pulled his fencing gloves from his bag and slipped them on. He entered the code, and the lock chirped encouragingly.

Tickets to Tibet, a picture of Mom, a large crimson book, and a flabellate peacock tail brooch; those were the contents of the safe. Mom looked happy, smiling gently in the photograph. Adrien rifled through the papers. It was paperwork, filled with numbers and technical jargon, but had no significance to him. He hurried to the book, heavy and frayed, and flipped through the pages. It was illustrated with pictures of superheroes, and written in an old dialect of Mandarin. Adrien shelved it.

Finally, the brooch sat innocuously in the safe, tiny gems shimmering faintly in the sepulchral light of the room. He touched the blue opal at the base. The gem glowed.

Adrien pulled back as if stung. The gem pulsed with warm blue light from an unknown source, growing faster and bright with each flash. It was a flashlight, then the oncoming headlights of a train, then the blinding headlong gaze of the distant sun. Adrien covered his eyes.

When the light subsided, he blinked spots from his eyes. A small blue creature floated in front of him. He blinked again.

No, it was definitely real. It was about the size of his closed fist, blue—Father would call it royal blue—with a fan of vibrant tail feathers and a crest of wire thin antennae. It blinked back at him.

“Oh, you look familiar,” it cooed. The creature danced around him, trailing shimmering blue sparks.

Adrien craned his head. He spun around, tracking its gliding path. “Wow,” he gushed, “you’re like a fairy!” His raised voice echoed off the high ceilings, and he flinched. Right, he was still in his father’s office.

The creature gave a showoff twirl. “Why thank you.” Its (his?) voice was warm and bright like sparklers.

Adrien eyed it, then the closed door, and back. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “What are you? What were you doing in my father’s safe?”

“I am a kwami,” it said conspiratorially, “the beautiful and charming Duusu! I grant the fantastic powers of intangibility and flight.”

Two pairs of footsteps resounded up the hallway. Adrien glanced at the doorway. He pocketed the brooch, and shut the door to the safe, hastily covering it with the painting.

He opened his bag. “Quick, hide!” he told the kwami.

Duusu sniffed disdainfully, but complied. He zipped into his bag just as the doors swung loudly open.

Adrien flinched and turned to the door, clutching the bag to his chest.

It was Nathalie and Gorilla, looking at him expectantly. He gave his best fake model smile and followed them out, clenching the strap of his bag tightly in a fist.

His questions would have to wait.


	3. Dox ex Machina

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's funny how quickly a day can be ruined by the blunt end of a keystroke. Funny in the way of your best friend becoming a supervillain—that is, not at all.
> 
> (Trigger warning for cyber bullying).

Since she had arrived in their class only a few months ago, Alya and Marinette had transformed from strangers to close friends. They sat together, shared whispers of crushes beneath sleepover blankets, and shared every facet of their dreams like precious jewels.

Alya complimented Marinette’s designs, coloring confidence into her sketchbook where there was often doubt. Marinette spent lazy weekends at Alya’s crowded apartment helping her edit reel after reel of footage: from the campaign address of Mayor Bourgeois to video commentaries of Ladybug in action to the quiet moments through bus windows. Alya was going to be a reporter one day, Marinette was certain.

“You’re her who?”

Alya let out an exaggerated sigh, smacking her palm against her forehead. “Her Lois Lane,” she said with emphasis. “You know, like Superman?”

Marinette shook her head. She bit heartily into her ham sandwich. Alya always lit up when she talked about superheroes. Her enthusiasm was infectious.

“Lois Lane is a reporter,” Alya explained. “She tells stories about the superhero of Metropolis, Superman, never knowing his true identity.” Alya dipped a spoonful of yogurt and shoved it into her mouth. “Until they fall in love.”

Marinette choked. She coughed a fit as the half-eaten bread lodged in her throat. A throatful of coughs dislodged the hazard.

Alya looked at her in mild concern. Marinette raised a hand. “Fine, sorry.”

“You need to slow down, girl.”

Marinette bit her lip and looked at the worn and read comic book in Alya’s hand. _Majestia_. When she—when Ladybug—had first debuted, Alya had quoted her favorite comic, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Marinette did something, even if it had seemed absurd and foolish at the time. It still did sometimes.

“You really look up to superheroes, don’t you?” A rhetorical question. Marinette knew the lengths her friend would go to catch a word from Ladybug’s lips.

“Of course! But they weren’t real like in comics, not before Ladybug and Volpina showed up.”

Marinette hummed agreement. It was called the _Ladyblog_ , but Alya started covering news about Volpina, too, after the vixen superhero’s press conference. Marinette leaned forward, lunch delayed. “What do you think about Volpina, Alya?”

Alya’s fingers danced across her soft jawline. She smirked. “I don’t know. Volpina’s very cool-”

Marinette was sensing a “but?”

Alya tugged at her plaid shirt collar. “-but she’s no Ladybug.”

She knew that Alya was a fan of Ladybug’s—even she wasn’t that oblivious—but the light in her eyes was startling. It made Marinette heavier and lighter at once, to be the indirect target of that light. She cleared the frog from her throat. “Y-yeah?

Alya fingered the necklace beneath her plaid shirt. “Yeah.”

The school bell rung, signalling lunch hour was over, but Marinette wanted to live in this moment awhile long. No akumas, no school, only sandwiches made with freshly baked bread, grass tickling her bare leg, and the warm smile of her best friend.

 

Alya scrolled through her web browser. E-mails collected like flies in a world wide spider web: updates spun from her news feed, messages from friends, and new Ladyblog comments.

Alya’s cursor hovered over the preview, “Ladybugged commented on…”

She clicked. And immediately regretted it. “The f•••ing c••• who runs this blog needs to shut the f••• up.” Except they didn’t censor themself.

Alya deleted the e-mail. Angry tears pricked at her eyes, reactionary and unconscious. She scowled at the screen, and opened the next unread e-mail. _When are you going to update?_ The words sloshed in a bog of digital bile.

 _This blog looks like it was designed by a kid from petite section._  
_Write more!_  
_Ladybug sucks, why don’t you write more about Volpina?_  
_Are you single?_  
_Put away the theories, girl, comic books are for men._

Alya slammed her laptop shut with enough force to draw an unconscious wince. Why were people online so horrible? Trolls didn’t live under bridges, they hid behind computer screens and usernames, and fed on misery like an akuma. Only trolls had free will, they chose to spread angry words like fire.

Alya strangled her phone and texted Marinette with careless keystrokes. _Where r u? Need 2 talk_.

Minutes. No answer. She glared at her phone. An e-mail alert popped up, demanding her attention.

 _This blog is useless. You should kill yourself_.

The butterfly was subtle as a virus, when it infected her. A mask like she always wanted made her as anonymous as her online persona. If Alya was not to be the superhero, she would play the role of vigilante. Ladybug would finally recognize her as an equal. And no would cower behind flimsy online identities. Doxxer would hunt them down and make them accountable for their words.

 

Ladyblog.fr/Forums/Akumas/Doxxer  
Last Updated: 2m

BuggingOut • 1h  
New supervillain. Anyone know what her deal is?

Pawsitivity • 1h  
Ahem, akuma /victim/

Kent3141 • 1h  
Akuma apologist? Get the hell out of here. We need to hold these supervillains accountable for their actions.  
Likes: 2

LadybugsGF • 34m  
The news is calling her “Lady Wifi”

Kent3141 • 20m  
That’s terrible! At least this site is reliable for good supervillain names.

LadybugsGF • 19m  
Ladybug’s on the scene! It looks like Wifi’s power is hacking.

Mothballz • 15m  
Not like the government doesn’t do that already.

BuggingOut • 13m  
No update from the Ladyblog?

Pawsitivity • 12m  
Maybe she’s busy? She’s usually so quick to post new coverage.

BuggingOut • 5m  
I hope she’s alright.

Pawsitivity • 2m  
<3 you, Ladyblogger!  
Likes: 5

 

It was as easy as swimming through a tunnel. The world went dark in the middle, vision abandoning her and leaving her senseless as a child in the womb. She relied on her newly tuned inner compass to navigate, thinking herself forward.

She held her breath out of instinct, but it was a place without oxygen, without definition. Information streamed past her like shooting stars—there and gone again before her mind could process it.

She emerged through the other side of cyberspace, still dripping data. Her body came back to her in increments, lungs remembering what breathing was, her senses re-adjusting to organic perception.

The akuma opened her eyes. The artificial light of a computer screen was a ghastly parody of sunlight and drew her in like a moth to flame. The dark office around her melted into the background; it was dead and silent, but the computer sung a symphony of notes which branched like the most twisted tree. Every device it had ever connected to left their digital fingerprints behind.

She flexed a hand experimentally. Neon lights danced up the sides of her costume and lingered on her fingertips like visiting fireflies. Her phone—the shell that shielded her fragile body and the source of her power—was clenched in one hand.

She placed it up against the softly whirring computer core. A loading bar inched across the screen as files downloaded. She sighed at the tortoise speed of it.

“Hey, you’re not supposed to be here!”

Her narrowed eyes flicked to the voice. He was a stout man, dressed to the nines in a smart business suit with a small gilded name tag identifying him as Rupert. In the ensuing staredown, Rupert’s face dawned comprehension, then anger. He marched towards her, raising his voice, “Those are private files, Missy. You can’t-”

It was a flick of the wrist.

He was frozen, literally, in place. She smirked at the placement of a bold violet pause button paralyzing his movement, imprisoning him in the instant between heartbeats. She entertained the idea of rewinding him, letting him find a room empty of her or his data. But no, that wasn’t punishment enough. She would suffer no anonymity. No more hiding behind usernames or money or masks.

The two screens synced, displaying her calling card: the image of a wifi symbol. Like wifi, she could be everywhere.

“I have your data,” she informed Hawkmoth. “Now give me what I want.”

The voice was a thought in her head, indistinguishable from her own mind. _You may hack your enemies_ , whispered the thought, smooth and sweet as molasses. _Then we expose Ladybug for the liar she is_.

The akuma laughed, delighted at the idea. Knowing Ladybug’s secret identity! She would be the one to know her true name. And names held power. It was no meager price to pay for her symbiont, but she would pay gladly for the privilege of knowing.

A tingle raced up her spine and she rerouted her attention to the computer. The green progress bar was full.

Download Complete.

 

“Lady Wifi” Hacks TVi Studio

By Mireille Caquet  
7 March 2017

TVi studio security was infiltrated Tuesday as an akuma threatened to release private online records to the public. “Lady Wifi”, as she is being referred as, was able to access any database connected to a wifi network.

Based on witness testimony, Lady Wifi “paused” several studio employees with her power, arresting them with large glowing pause symbols. Her powerset was technopathic in nature, owing to her akumatized phone.

Personal records of over 500 TVi employees were leaked, as well as shocking information regarding the media conglomerate’s privacy policies. Evidence came to light that TVi had been recording intimate consumer data and selling it to partnered advertising firms. Subscriptions to their streaming service have steadily declined—as well as their market stocks—after the information was made viral through Twitter.

Mayor Andre Bourgeois faces renewed allegations of bribery, brought to light by the leaks. Several receipts indicate money was received from his campaign office. Bourgeois denied the claims. “I had no financial involvement with TVi,” he stated in a subsequent press conference. “But what about D’Argencourt? What was his involvement?”

Armand D'Argencourt, Bourgeois’ re-election opponent, was a perennial target of TVi. He previously criticised the company for their biased portrayal of himself and other members of his party, La République En Marche. Financial reports suggest that over twenty-thousand euros were paid over a period of five years to fund a smear campaign against D’Argencourt and his allies.

Whether or not an akuma-uncovered leak is admissible as evidence—or in fact, if anyone intends to use it at all—remains to be seen. According to an anonymous source from the Paris Police Department, “We intend to investigate the veracity of the claims.”

In addition to the TVi leaks, more than thirty individuals were “doxxed” by Lady Wifi. Their personal details—including phone numbers and addresses—were posted publicly online to the _Ladyblog_ , a privately owned superhero news site. Shortly after the akuma attack, the post was taken down.

Though the motivations of akumas can be inscrutable, Wifi marked her post with the title, “Open Troll Season”, perhaps referring to internet “trolls” who harass people online. The blog proprietor, an anonymous figure called “the Ladyblogger” posted a response apologizing for the leak.

Ladybug was unavailable to comment, but Volpina released a statement, saying “the network is safe and, more importantly, the employees of TVi.” She did not comment on the released information.

 

Alya knelt on the ground, palms flat, panting like she had run a marathon. Her hair was coily and unstraightened. Her forehead was visible with sweat.

Messy tears swam down Marinette’s face, and she scrubbed them away. Her heart was a deep pit. Despair rose like gorge in her throat, and Marinette swallowed it.

“Are you okay?”

Volpina’s arms folded protectively around her chest. Her fluffy tail swished like a pendulum. “The akumas are hurting you.” She looked at Ladybug in concern.

Marinette nodded brusquely and walked past Volpina, crouching down to Alya’s level and placing a gentle hand on her friend’s back. “Alya?”

Alya looked up with wide eyes, her breath catching. “Ladybug,” she said, and Marinette’s stomach knotted at the awe in her voice. “You know my name.”

“Yes,” Marinette confirmed. She slid her hand down Alya’s shoulder and took her hand in hers. Her voice was thick with unchoked tears. “Of course I know the brave girl who faces akumas with her camera.” Marinette held Alya’s eyes with hers. “I follow your _Ladyblog_. I‘m a fan of your work.”

Alya’s lips parted, and she launched Marinette into a tight bear hug. Marinette’s rolling tears, stolen from “Lady Wifi”, spilled down onto Alya’s soft, soapy hair. She breathed in the scent of citrus shampoo; it reminded her of the delicate lemon cakes her father baked.

The sound of police sirens pulled Marinette from her reverie. She looked to Volpina, who sighed. “I’ll take care of it,” she promised, “but you get to debrief them the next time.” Marinette nodded gently to not disturb Alya’s embrace.

In a few, long moments, Alya released her cephalopod grasp and looked at her, hands on Marinette’s shoulders. Alya’s subtle makeup ran tracks down her face. Marinette gently reached up, and seeing no objection, wiped the dark ink away.

“I want to go home,” said Alya. She sounded like a lost child, separated from her parent.

Marinette stood, pulling Alya up with her, who swayed slightly on her feet. “Let me walk you home,” she said in a tone that brooked no argument.

Alya nodded and followed when Marinette took her hand and led her. She was tired—the kind of tired that made your bones ache—but Alya’s hand was her anchor. Their hands clasped throughout the short journey there, but not a word was spoken between them. Marinette lost herself in the silence.

When they reached the apartment where Alya and her family lived, Marinette stopped, withdrawing to the far reaches of Alya’s clasped hand.

Alya raised a tentative brow.

She drew her yo-yo and gave it an experimental walk-the-dog and then walked it up to Alya’s second story bedroom window. Alya must have been too tired to question how Ladybug knew where she lived, let alone the location of her window in particular.

Alya drew closer and melted into Marinette’s arms, which protested with a weak pull of muscle. Through the open window, she leaped, Alya’s arms linked over her back. She promptly placed Alya on her bed, rumpled sheets and strewn cords and all, and stood in the room that she wasn’t supposed to recognize.

Alya beamed up at her like she was Majestia, like she was the first gift on Christmas morning, like so many eager promises and gentle words of encouragement Alya poured on mousy Marinette like the nourishing rain of spring.

And Marinette broke.

She kneeled on the hardwood floor of Alya’s undersized and overcrowded bedroom, bawling into the supple fabric of her gloves. The akuma fluttered dark and errant in her, sadness welling up like a spring and overflowing the shallow banks of her vigor. She bawled grossly, saliva and mucus gushing without permission or end. And then the pitiful mess she was made her cry. And the humiliation of Ladybug, Alya’s hero, crying in front of her made her cry.

She couldn’t stop.

It may have a moment, or even an awkward, confused minute before Alya wrapped her warm body around Marinette again. “Shh, it’s okay,” she murmured, “you won. You saved me. You saved me.”

“I wasn’t,” mucusy inhale, “fast enough.”

“Don’t say that, Ladybug. You cured me. No one else could have done that. Not even Volpina.” Her fingers, so nimble with technology, brushed through Marinette’s hair.

“Sometimes I wish that I never became Ladybug.”

Alya stifled a gasp, but Marinette heard it. The next she knew, Alya was pulling her from the floor and depositing her on the bed, and a box of tissues was placed in her lap.

Marinette took them gratefully, messily wiping the physical effects of despair from her face like blood from a crime scene.

Alya pulled her desk chair free of the dirty laundry wrapped around the wheels and slid seated over to the bed. She pulled out her phone and stared at it. Then, whatever she was considering passed, and she sighed, clicking its power button. The screen blinked to life, a mechanical facsimile of the overbright power the akuma granted it.

“Listen, Ladybug.” Her screen greeted _Hello Alya_ in loud orange letters. Alya tapped at it absentmindedly. “I’ve been following your story for a long time now, since you began.”

Marinette set the box aside. Her hands crumpled and uncrumpled her soiled wad of tissues.

Alya bit her lip. Leaning forward, she put her hands on Marinette’s, gently unclasping her scatterbrained hands and throwing the tissue aside to flutter and clutter. “You need help,” she said, “let me help you.”

Ladybugs danced on Marinette’s skin. Her eyes and cheeks were hot. “No, I don’t need- how could you even? I couldn’t possibly put you at risk.”

“I already am,” she reasoned. “Everyone in Paris is, as long as akumas keep hurting people.”

She was right, of course. Marinette knew that. But she never wanted to see her friend like that again, violet outline of the akuma lighting her face like a neon bar sign. Her shoulders drooped.

“You know I’m right. I’ve seen you in action. I know how you fight, how to track down akumas-”

“-alright-”

“-as fast as anyone, and-alright?”

Marinette nodded. The action jostled her jello-filled brain. “Alright.”

Alya’s grip tightened and she bounced on her swivel chair, squeaking, “I won’t let you down, Ladybug.” A tipped chin and an unwavering gaze melted the brain jello to sticky juice. “I promise.”

Despite all odds, Marinette believed her.

 

Confessions of an Akuma Victim  
Posted: 8 March 2017

Hello, Ladyblog. This isn’t the usual kind of post that I make. I have been reporting news about Paris’ superhero for months, now. There’s been a dozen supervillains Ladybug’s defeated, and I cheered alongside all of you. I never stopped to think about what a victim of an akuma felt like when they were taken over. And they are victims; that’s clear, now.

You may have seen me on the news recently. The “professional” news. Not the live coverage you’re used to from the Ladybug. I was up close and personal with Ladybug in a way I never thought I would be.

I’m Lady Wifi.

Or I was anyways. For less than a day. But while I was in the costume and the mask, it felt like months. I was myself, and I wasn’t. Do you know the feeling you get when you’re angry and it’s irrational, but you’re just too caught up in the anger? It was like that, but I wasn’t able to cool off. I was so mad at everyone who had said such cruel, hateful things to me on the site that I had made for you.

I thought about posting those comments, but that would only encourage them. Instead, I’ve blocked anyone who broke the blog rules. Whether they were against me or anyone else who posts here. Ladybug doesn’t compromise on bullying. I won’t either.

How many of the akumas became villains because of a hateful word or seemingly insignificant, careless action towards them? That’s not a rhetorical question, because it’s never one I stopped to ask before. One of this blog’s policies was to protect the identities of the akumatized, but it also became a tool to distance myself from them. Akumas were villains, Ladybug and Volpina are superheros. Except, this is real life, not a comic book. These are real people behind the masks. Real people with real lives who were hurt enough to be vulnerable, to become corrupted.

Volpina said in a press conference that it was the individual’s fault for succumbing to the akuma, but I don’t think that that’s fair. Pigeonman wasn’t a monster. Stoneheart wasn’t a kid who killed animals or hit people smaller than him. They were victims, looking for a way to stand up for themselves. We need to learn not to vilify them, and treat them like what they are: people.

Ladybug did more than stop a villain. She saved a person, a Parisian who looks up to her. And did you know what she did after she took that butterfly out of me? She asked if I was okay. She walked me home until I was safe, shielded me from the anxious press. She’s the best kind of hero: a kind one.

On that note, I’ll be taking a hiatus for awhile. Don’t worry; the Ladyblog will still update regularly, but I’ll be away from the message boards and forums. Please, be kind to each other. The akumas, wherever they really come from, feed on our hate. So keep them hungry.

Good luck.  
~the Ladyblogger


	4. Calm Before the Storm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marinette supports Nino at his televised debut as a DJ, but will her responsibility to her friend conflict with her promise to Tikki? Hawkmoth knows her uncertainly and uses it to his advantage.

Marinette slung an arm around her friend’s shoulders. “You’re going to do great, Nino.”

“Course I am, dude.” He gave her a confident wink, but his lopsided smile frayed nervousness.

He clutched his laptop to his chest, headphones as always slung around his neck like a mobile hook. He was here to prove his talent to Paris at _The Challenge_ , an overproduced but widely watched game show.

Marinette had witnessed him preparing all week, mixing tracks in the library, while walking with her to and from school, and even sneaking a listen during their lagging science class. When Nino set his mind to something, he was dedicated. She admired his vigor.

“Adrien, over here!” Nino waved at the shuffling horde of tv crew. Adrien’s blonde head bobbed among them. His brick wall of a bodyguard trailed protectively after him like a loyal guard dog. Adrien parted the sea and greeted them with his pearly model smile.

Marinette felt her face grow hot despite herself. “H-hey, Adrien.” _Smooth, girl_. Alya’s sarcastic teasing played stereo in her mind. Her blush deepened. What was it about Adrien Agreste that made her so flustered?

Adrien and Nino performed their signature handshake, a complex maneuver of fistbumps and high fives. A tick of tension visibly shifted from Nino’s shoulders, and Marinette’s smile twisted unconsciously. Adrien made him more at ease. He seemed to have the opposite effect on her.

“Are you guys good waiting here while I’m on?” Nino gave her a flash-in-the-pan wink.

She rolled her eyes. Right, her “crush.” Leave it to Nino to tease them both together.

Adrien, oblivious, replied, “Of course. You’ll do awesome, Nino”

“We’ll be right here, cheering you on.”

A buxom woman in a well-tailored suit came to collect Nino, who was now sauntering with belied confidence onto the stage. Marinette and Adrien listened, rapt, as he bantered with tv sensation Alec Cataldi like they were old friends.

“I can’t wait to hear his mix,” Adrien said.

Marinette nodded along. Had Nino not shared his mix with Adrien yet? Nino was rarely private with his music, unless he was working on something big. He preferred to share his creative process. It was unusual for him to keep this one so close to the chest.

The beat came on, slow and lilting, and she immediately recognized the opening chords. EDM riffs punctuated a smooth underlying drum beat.

Then the beat dropped, and Marinette’s heart thudded in kind. Her foot tapped along as an unbidden smile stretched across her face.

She snuck a look at Adrien, who danced like a novelty bobblehead. She giggled. He looked like a dork.

He caught her staring, and her eyes fled to Nino onstage, then back.

“He’s good,” Adrien supplied.

“Uh-huh.”

The silence hung like curdled milk to the backdrop of crescendoing dance music. The last bars struck, and Marinette closed her eyes, nodding along. Here it was, the song’s lackluster finale.

Except this time, instead of a whimper, the song went out with a bang.

Marinette whooped and Adrien echoed her, raucous cheers pouring from his lips like an American on sports night. They clapped an enthusiastic ovation, punctuating the final note of the song. Her ears rung pleasantly.

Nino shared a concluding chatter with Alec Cataldi, then descended from the stage with the same swagger he fed it. He carried a 100-watt smile.

Their cheering rose in fervor and volume, and they attacked Nino with a half-and-half hug.

Nino turtled between them. His skin was warm beneath the stage lights. “Well?”

“You were amazing, Nino-

“-I can't believe you-”

“-you’ll win for sure!”

“-fixed the ending. It was perfect!”

Nino chuckled. “Aw, thanks dudes.” If not for his dark complexion, Marinette was sure she’d see his blush.

A cold shiver graced her arms with goosebumps. “They really turn the AC up here. Is that a camera thing?” she asked Nino.

He shrugged. “Maybe. I know if it’s too hot the insides will melt.”

“Do you want my jacket, Marinette?” Adrien asked, already shrugging off the white button-up.

“Uh, no, no. That’s alright, Adrien.”

A sharp crack splintered the ceiling. Marinette’s eyes followed her ears. Sleet covered the steel beams high above as if it were the epicenter of a blizzard, crawling further and further. The pressure in the room dropped palpably as a cold chill filled the air. Marinette, in her light jacket, was suddenly freezing.

Marinette and Adrien’s bodyguard tensed, running on parallel instincts, and wasn't he once a soldier? Adrien and Nino shivered, trading looks of equal confusion, while a few proactive crewmates moved to open the studio doors. One reached for the metal handle, and shrieked in surprised pain, jolting back. “It _shocked_ me!” he complained.

Despite the cold, Marinette’s palms grew warm with sweat. She ducked through the crowd, who were growing into their panic, and ran to the large, blind-covered windows, peering through the heavy slats.

Ice. It was nothing but thick, white ice beyond the studio’s view.

“Dude, no way!”

Marinette spun around. Nino and Adrien were behind her, peering at the ice wall. Adrien’s bodyguard hovered close by, penning them in like they were clumsy sheep. Marinette bit her lip. She needed to transform without anyone seeing, but the room was crowded, big and open and devoid of hiding spots, even if she could slip from her friends’ concerned attention.

“It must be an akuma,” said Adrien, fear and excitement fighting for control of his voice. “I’ve never seen one before.”

“Me neither.” Marinette lied. There were rafters, maybe she could climb—no, that wouldn’t work. The ceiling creaked under the pressure. The lights flickered, and someone screamed. Someone always screamed.

“Wait, didn’t you see Stoneheart with Alya?” Nino asked.

“Huh?” Marinette blinked. “Uh, no, that was… someone else.” She couldn’t knock out the lights without anyone noticing. She couldn’t use the door to escape. She was trapped, trapped in this mass of cold, panicked bodies whom she couldn’t save without compromising her identity. Without a plan, she paced.

“Marinette.” Adrien laid a hand on her shoulder, and she jumped. He smiled patiently. “Hey, it’s okay. Ladybug will save us!”

She laughed bitterly at the irony.

 

They were trapped there. Despite the dramatic change in weather, there was no appearance of an akuma. The room grew colder by the minute. Adrien and Nino sunk to the ground, huddled together for warmth. Marinette eventually gave up on pacing, and sat between them, arms wrapped around her legs. Most of the civilians had gone quiet, the quick fear of panic shedding into hushed uncertainty.

People had tried to turn the buffet table into an improvised battering ram, to no success. It lay upended and abandoned. The lights flickered intermittently like candle flames dancing in a mistral. On the fourteenth floor, the windows were no exit, even if they could manage to clear the wall of ice.

Of course, they had tried to call for help, but the entire studio was cut off. Phones had no signal, nor did the usually climate-controlled tv equipment. They had been frozen in for more than an hour now. Her parents were probably worried sick about her.

Her parents. They were why she couldn’t transform here, she reminded herself. If Marinette revealed herself as Ladybug in a crowded room, there was no going back. Her identity would compromise the safety of everyone she loved. It was coincidence that Alya had been corrupted, but taking on her pain was nearly too much for Marinette to bear. If Hawkmoth knew her name, he knew the names of her friends and family. She had no doubt that he would exploit that weakness. Marinette may have accepted Tikki’s mantel, but there were some sacrifices she wasn’t willing to make.

 _You cannot tell anyone your secret_ , Tikki had said. _The cost is too high_.

Marinette got the impression that the previous Ladybug wasn’t as anonymous as she was. There was old tension in her voice.

She spent another moment collecting her thoughts before her tangled nerves frayed to loose thread. The air in her lungs was tight, every breath punctuated by the marrow-chilling cold. Adrien’s fragrant cologne tickled her nose, and she sneezed.

“Bless you,” he said, looking up. He had stopped shivering. That was probably a bad sign. Adrien's usually pale face was flushed bright red, and he was fiddling with the scarf around his neck. The scarf that she had made for him. He was still under the impression that it was a gift from his father. She was content to let him believe that.

“Thanks,” she mumbled. She ran what she knew about hypothermia through her head as if memorizing remiss facts for a test.

Shivering.

Drowsiness.

She put her finger to her wrist and the slender vein there that nurses always missed. Her pulse whispered back to her. Was it slow? She had no reference point to compare. The adrenaline thundering her ears as Ladybug hardly counted as an optimal heart rate.

She looked back at Nino, slouched over on her other side. He was huddled like a turtle hiding in its shell, his head half-submerged by his hoodie. Marinette moved her knee, which felt like it was encased in gelatin, and nudged him.

“What are you…?” he mumbled.

She took his cool hand in hers and searched for the beat of his pulse. It took a moment to find it, but there it was—a hesitant murmur like feeling the background vibration of Nino’s headphones when she would press her head against his.

She shivered in spite of the cold. They needed to leave this building. Soon. If the akuma didn’t find them, hypothermia would be their supervillain. She squeezed Nino’s hand.

He shifted, eyes blinking open to stare up at her from the shadow of his hood. He drew his shoulders closer together. Reminded of the cold, his teeth renewed their shattering.

A shard of guilt wormed its way through her veins. It wasn’t just her identity she was protecting. If she delayed action, did nothing, then her friends might die, too. How could she choose?

The ceiling lurched in fits and starts, shivering, and groaning about the cold. It sounded like a rattling radiator about to break.

A beam groaned and lurched free, raining down shards of ice. It dislodged from the network of beams and fell, hurtling towards the crowd, and Marinette hastily closed her eyes.

The impact vibrated through the floor and into her bones. The spell of quiet was broken in more shouting, more meaningless noise of renewed panic. Marinette grabbed Nino and Adrien’s hands, and squeezed them tightly in the chaos. They were cold as ice.

Someone was crying. Marinette opened her eyes. The beam was now wreckage on the ground. An aureola of fractals circled the point of impact. No blood, no body pierced. Marinette let out a breath, steam expelling like a tea kettle.

 _Crack_ ! Something pounded at the door. _Crack!_ The frozen hinges shook. It was the akuma, it had to be, looking for victims to terrorize. She couldn’t hoard her secret any longer. Marinette unhooked her arm from Adrien and reached into her purse. Tikki was shivering like a leaf in the wind. “Tikki,” she said under her breath, “transform-”

 _Crack!_ The door burst inward from its iced hinges, now shattered to bits. Volpina strutted in, twirling her flute like a baton. She punctuated the head of it into the icy floor. “I’m here to save you, Paris! Everybody out!”

They needed no second request. Civilians, shaking in cold and fear in kind, struggled to their feet and streamed from the room like a swiftly thawing river. Marinette lifted Adrien and Nino to their feet. Adrien’s bodyguard cleared the way for his ward, and she pulled the boys along.

As she passed Volpina, their eyes met. Her eyes were amber, lit up like a charging light in the big, dim room. Volpina winked. “Last one out?”

Marinette nodded. Finally. She needed to make sure that her friends were safe. Then, Ladybug would join the fight. “Where’s the akuma?”

Volpina herded them out from the rear. Her boots made cracks in the thin ice. She put a clawed hand delicately on Marinette’s shoulder and moved her forward. “Don’t worry, I’ve got this under control. Just get yourself to safety.”

Marinette reluctantly obeyed. They followed the pack of fleeing people through corridors covered similarly in ice, carefully so as not to slip and fall. Dim red emergency lights flickered warningly.

When they passed an unlit corner, she halted, watching the retreating heads of Nino and Adrien. His bodyguard would keep them safe. She inched back along the wall, and retraced her steps, then broke out into a run.

She was careful not to slip, feet retreading cracked footprints. She was lucky to borrow Ladybug’s dexterity; Marinette alone was as clumsy as a newborn calf. Until she collided headlong with a moving body.

Marinette groaned from the ground. Her head made a wide impact in the ice, like the crater of a meteorite. Her head radiated bruising pain and cold, and she blinked up through spots in her eyes. Volpina skittered on the ground opposite her, slipping and sliding in an attempt to sit up. Her ears were drawn down in frustration. Marinette laughed.

“You think this is funny?” Volpina spat, but it lacked heat. “You should have left. Why didn’t you leave?”

The lights died. The hallway sunk into darkness, cut only by the lights of Volpina’s eyes. Volpina swore under her breath. “Come on,” she growled. “Every minute I’m saving you, the akuma could be hurting other people.”

She suddenly felt guilty for laughing. “Sorry,” she whispered.

Volpina sighed. “Come on, then.” She grabbed Marinette’s arm and pulled her to her feet. Marinette’s head spun from the sudden change in direction, and whirled further as she was picked up in a fireman’s carry and rushed through the cold and the dark. “Don’t worry, I can see in the dark.”

Of course she could. That meant there was no use finding a dark corner to transform in. She would have to sneak back in as Ladybug after Volpina “rescued” her. Her head was a carousel that couldn't tell left from right in the dark. Volpina was fast, even running on two legs, and she navigated down the halls and stairs with urgency.

Finally, she skidded to a halt, sliding gracelessly across the ice and nearly dropping Marinette. They were on the first floor, light streaming a hole in a great wall of blue ice where the entrance would be. It looked like a wrecking ball had gotten angry with the wall. Ice slowly crawled across the air, nearly cutting on the tower from the outside again.

“Sorry!” Volpina said, and before Marinette could ask why, she was being tossed like a bowling ball, sliding across the ice and through the narrowing opening, landing in a flurry of snow. She saw Volpina’s worried face moments before the ice closed shut.

 

The police were kind and did their job, comforting her and wrapping her in a heated blanket while a paramedic dutifully checked her for a concussion that she almost certainly had. She resisted the urge to simply run from them. With her shivering, and the veritable moat of police officers, she would hardly get far. Nino put a comforting hand on her knee. “I’m sorry we left you,” he said, and he sounded like he had been crying.

Now, she felt stupid _and_ guilty.

She tried to think of a way to isolate herself again, but her head made all escape attempts foggy. TVi’s media skyscraper was an icy monolith, no communications in or out. The fire department had tried and failed to break the ice. Anything more violent could hurt the people inside. Who knew how Volpina was doing inside, or if there were any hostages left.

Marinette’s neck strained to crane up to the very top. There was an ominous dark storm cloud obscuring the highest floors. Every tenth heartbeat, it unleashed furious lightning. The sky surrounding it in every direction was clear. The anomaly was the akuma. Marinette had no doubt that there were people still left, trapped inside and freezing to death.

Screw it. She couldn’t weigh her identity against so many lives. That would twist her motives, selfless or not, into something not unlike an akuma. She stepped down from the ambulance and past Nino’s steadying arms. “Marinette, what are you-”

“Sorry, Nino. I,” she bit her lip. “I have to go.” And she took off into the crowd without further explanation, bobbing and weaving through overworked paramedics and huddles of cold and weary civilians. She lost Nino, his voice melting in the crowd, and sprinted out the other side, running and running until she reached the relative privacy of a gross and dingy alleyway. It smelled of piss and garbage.

Her face was wet, and she wiped at it with surprise to find tears in her eyes. “Tikki?”

She opened her purse, thankfully still at her side. Tikki was shivering, cold to the touch. “I’m sorry,” she said through tears. “But we need to rescue the tower.”

Tikki coughed like a newborn kitten, and blinked open her eyes. “S-say the words.”

“Transform me.”

As soon as she transformed, she fled the alley. Her head already felt clearer, the cold nothing but an old annoyance. She found Nino across the street, looking wildly up and down and calling her name. Her civilian name. Then, “Ladybug! Please, you have to help me find my friend!”

Marinette swallowed her guilt and brushed past him. “I’m sorry. I need to fight the akuma.” His face flashed hurt and betrayal. “I’m sorry,” she repeated.

She rappelled over the crowd, ignoring the cheers and calls of her name. She punched the ice wall with a guttural yell. A satisfying spiderweb of cracks buckled under her fist. She hit it again in quick succession, and the wall shattered like a baseball through a glass window. She stepped through, the ice solidifying behind her. The room was so cold, but now she barely minded it.

The dark, however, was an issue. She lacked Volpina’s night vision. She felt around, hand along the wall. She was careful not to slip. There would be no one around to help her up this time.

When she reached the stairwell, she threw her yo-yo up as high as she could, and hooked it around a bannister many floors up. She tugged the string and pulled herself up. As she ascended, the air became hotter and hotter.

Drops of water echoed through the stairwell as if falling from stalactites. The air thickened and Marinette hauled herself over the railing to find the stairs this high free of ice. Instead, her feet splashed in a tepid puddle of water, running down the stairs.

A horizontal sliver of light shone from the floor. She felt for a door, and yelped as its metal handle burned her hand even through her glove. She gritted her teeth and wrapped her yo-yo around it, pulling the door open. A wave of heat and faceful of smoke choked her, and there was light at last. Fire.

She choked and coughed at the acrid scent stinging and burrowing into her throat. Flames ate through papers and media equipment and beyond that there was yelling. Marinette followed the source, ducking low to avoid inhaling more of the fumes. Flames bathed her legs, but were dissuaded by her magic-weaved costume. She shoved open the door that housed the noise.

Flames wreathed the studio, climbing up the fake set trees and mountains. A sign advertising _The Challenge_ coughed and died in smoke. Volpina slammed against the wall, the air audibly punched from her lungs. Fire lit her tail like a candlewick.

Marinette rushed to her side, batting out her tail with her hands. Volpina’s sharp eyes snapped to her, teeth in the beginning of a snarl, before they widened.

“I’m sorry,” she said like a broken record. “I let you down you down. You have every right to-”

“Duck!” Volpina shouted, tackling her. They rolled body over body, her singed tail in Marinette’s mouth, and landed in a heap. Marinette jumped up and stood protectively over Volpina as her partner rose to her feet.

The akuma was the image of a witch, dark tattered skirt and pigtails like stacks of lightning bolts. She absently twirled a—was that an umbrella?—an umbrella like a gun in a parade march.

“Stormy Weather,” Volpina explained. “Controls elements. And don’t be sorry, just be ready.”

Volpina and Stormy Weather circled each other like cowboys ready to duel. The tip of Stormy’s umbrella crackled with unleashed electricity. Smoke clouded the arena between them. Marinette spun her yo-yo as an oscillating fan, and the smoke and embers blew into Stormy’s eyes. She lifted her hand to cover her eyes, and Volpina pounced. She feinted, dodging Stormy’s answering blast of lightning.

Marinette ran at them. Another jolt stopped her in her tracks, wracked with seizing lightning that made her fingers numb. She gasped for breath, only to find smoke. The shock brought her to one knee.

Volpina jumped and rolled behind Stormy, retrieving what must have been her flute. She and the akuma crossed weapons, and dueled like swordswomen. The fire cast them as duelists in the dark. Marinette couldn’t move her arms.

Stormy Weather shot another blast, rippling through Volpina’s flute and tearing a visceral yowl from her lips. The flute clattered to the ground, and Volpina quickly retrieved it with her off hand, awkwardly defending herself from Stormy’s onslaught of attacks.

Marinette moved through the cloud of numbness taking her body hostage. She crawled across the relatively smokeless ground on her hands and knees, and hooked a leg under Stormy Weather’s feet. The akuma stumbled. Volpina advanced.

Marinette grabbed a fistful of Stormy Weather’s skirt and pulled herself up. Stormy balanced against the wall. Her umbrella flashed white twice in quick succession. A blast of lightning made scorch marks in the ceiling, successively covered by a layer of ice so thin that it made steam.

Marinette bit her lip hard enough to draw blood. She grabbed Stormy Weather’s arm and twisted, locking it behind her head. She slammed her against the wall. Again. Then again. Stormy coughed and dropped her umbrella.

Marinette slammed her once more into the wall, then threw her over her head and across the room, into a melty black puddle that may once have been a television.

She struggled against the ground, black tar-like liquid sticking to her hands and face and hair. Marinette pushed her back into the black with the heel of her boot, and tied her hands behind her back with her yo-yo.

Volpina retrieved the dark umbrella, untouched by fire, and held it aloft. The fire-shadows made her look like a dashing knight. All this destruction, a whole building hostage to the elements, and all she had to do was snap it. Under Volpina’s strength, it would be done and over in a moment.

“Wait!”

Volpina looked at her, nose wrinkling in confusion. Her eyes were on fire, and they looked beautiful and terrible.

Marinette pulled herself to her feet. She had scorch marks on her knees. Her body couldn’t decided whether it was cold or hot, but knew that it was in pain. She reached out a placating hand. “Please wait.”

Volpina lowered the umbrella slowly. “Why? Akumas are evil. We destroy them. Why should I hesitate?”

“Because I asked you to.”

A play of emotions danced with the light across Volpina’s face. Finally, she lowered the umbrella. She stepped over the melted video equipment that looked like the mausoleum of a wax museum, and set the umbrella into Marinette’s hands.

“Thank you.”

Volpina dodged her eyes. “Now what?”

“Now, we start asking questions.”

 

Volpina snarled, baring her distinctive fangs. “Where is Hawkmoth?” she screamed.

Stormy Weather wriggled in her bindings. With the akuma corrupting her, she maintained a connection to Hawkmoth. She and Volpina could use his own power against him.

They were in an abandoned studio, one mercifully untouched by fire or ice. It was sandwiched between two sets under seasonal construction, doubling as a storage room. The dead eyes of cameras surrounded them like slumbering sentries. Pale static light flashed from the legion of soulless TV screens.

Marinette held Stormy’s corrupted umbrella tightly. She twisted the purplish fabric between her hands. Would it work for her, if she tried to use it? It felt like holding a ticking time bomb.

“Tell us where Hawkmoth is, and we’ll let you go,” Marinette promised.

Fat tears welled from Stormy Weather’s rosy face. “No, no, he’ll take away my power,” she cried, “I can’t. I won’t.”

Volpina grabbed Stormy Weather by the lapel of her blouse and hoisted her, chair and all, above the ground. “Hawkmoth’s not in control here,” she growled, “ _we_ are. So you’d better start talking.”

Stormy’s legs kicked out ineffectually. She didn’t have superhuman strength like Marinette or Volpina did. She was nothing without the source of her akuma. Stormy seemed to realize it, feet going limp, dangling.

She spilled in a rush of broken sentences, starting and stopping like a car with a busted engine. Her name was Aurore. She was a meteorologist and the premier weather anchor at TVi. After filing a harassment complaint with HR, she was summarily fired.

Her frosty blonde hair matted against her face, wet from the deluge of her weather attacks. Her running mask of eyeshadow seemed to be a part of her akuma mask. How cruel of Hawkmoth to twist her face into permanent despair.

“All they do is pick and pick and _pick_ ,” she cried. “They take everything away, but Hawkmoth let me take it back. He came to me and made me a deal, and now they know what it’s like to be powerless.”

Volpina scoffed. She had reluctantly let Aurore fall back into her chair, but didn’t dare undo the taut bindings. She paced the set, one ear swiveled to Aurore as the akuma confessed.

Marinette’s arms were crossed, akumatized umbrella lying like a cold bomb at her feet. “What did he offer you?”

Aurore leaned as far as her bindings would allow. Her voice was a quiet murmur, the hesitance of a ghost. “Power.”

Volpina cracked her knuckles in a unsubtle show of force. “Not helpful. Where’s Hawkmoth hiding? Who is he?”

Aurore’s lips warbled. “I won’t betray him.” Volpina growled. Aurora flinched, head ducking like an abused child from a raised fist. She spat on the ground by Volpina’s feet. “You’re no better than they are; you’re all bullies.” She hung her head, hair fanning her like a stringy curtain, and retreated into herself. She looked young, twenty maybe, no older than twenty-five. “I’ve fought and clawed my way up this fricking industry, and I’m not going to let people push me down anymore.”

Volpina’s ears twitched. She glanced back at the closed door. “Not helpful.”

Marinette ran a hand through her hair. Volpina was right; this was getting them nowhere fast. She stopped just short of Aurore and crouched down to her level. “Aurore, what did Hawkmoth want from you in return?”

“I won’t tell you.”

Volpina flexed her claws deliberately, and bared her teeth for good measure. They dripped with saliva and tapered to pearlescent fangs in the low light.

Aurore’s already chalky face bled white as a ghost. “Y-you can’t make me talk.”

“Maybe the police can,” said Marinette. She didn’t like the idea of getting them involved in this, but the situation hung on a precipice she wouldn’t name.

“The police are the easy way,” Volpina added. “We’re the _hard_ way.”

“I don’t know anything!” Tears beaded and fell from Aurora’s eyes, dripping dark as oil. Pathetic weeping keened from her like a dying animal. “He just talks to me.”

Marinette gently tugged on the thin thread. “How does he talk to you, Aurore?”

“Through the akuma,” she said simply. “I hear him in my mind when he wants to speak to me. He said I could keep my superpower if I lured you here.” A watery smile split her face. “And it worked.”

“How did he find you?”

“I was hurt. He heard my heart call out, and sent his little akuma to help me.” Her voice was wistful.

Marinette was going to throw up. He cut people open and stuffed them with false hope. It wasn’t evil that made a villain; it was desperation, exploited and twisted into hate. And all to get to them.

“Can you talk to him?’

“I don’t know.”

“Enough of your tiptoeing around,” Volpina snapped. “She’s going to whine and cry until she buys enough time to escape, or another akuma comes and sucker-punches us!” She rounded on Aurore with a snarl. “Talk. _Now_.”

“I, uh, I don’t know! I never tried talking to him!”

“Do it.”

“W-what?”

“Try it now. Talk to Hawkmoth.”

“N-no. I can’t.”

Volpina backhanded her. “Do it!”

Aurore—no, Aurore was gone again—Stormy Weather’s eyes went white as lightning. She spat dark blood that spattered at Volpina’s feet. Volpina pivoted away as the fluid sizzled with the stink of ozone.

A purple ring glowed around her face, and Stormy smirked, ichor and malice dripping from the corner of her mouth. It wasn’t her voice that spoke. ”Hello, Ladybug.”

 

A cold hand wrapped itself around her stomach. That voice, she knew it. She knew it when the akuma was purified, whispering too softly to comprehend. She knew it in her nightmares, tempting her with pyrrhic promises.

Her guts squirmed like wriggling worms. She didn’t trust herself to speak.

Volpina found her voice first. “Hawkmoth.” It was laced with steel and threads of something that sounded uncomfortably close to excitement. “You’re not going to win. We’ll stop you.”

Hawkmoth-in-Stormy laughed. Not maniacally like a cartoon supervillain, but calmer, reminding Marinette sharply of entitled men that infested the lobby of Mayor Bourgeois’ hotel like scuttling cockroaches. There was not trace left of Stormy Weather’s manic falsetto.

“No. Your Miraculouses will only further my ambitions. You cannot hide them from me forever.” Stormy straightened her back, searching them with faraway eyes. “I should thank you. With your televised appearances, it has made finding them all the easier.”

Marinette breathed surreptitiously through her nose. Her heart kicked against her chest like a petulant child, and she felt her pulse rioting in her ears, loud enough she swore Hawkmoth could hear it, too. “You sent the akumas to draw us out.”

Stormy smiled like a proud teacher. The purple butterfly halo lit her pale skin paler and stole the shadows from the planes of her delicate features. “Very observant, Ladybug. Fu chose you well. I knew that if I showed my hand, he would send you to collect my butterflies.” Her mouth folded into a frown. “It was quite reckless of him, choosing a child to bear the mantle.”

Volpina situated herself between Marinette and Stormy Weather. Her claws were unsheathed from hands twitching at her sides. “You’re a coward, hiding behind puppets. Come and face us!”

Stormy tsk-ed, settling back casually—as casually as she could in her bindings. “Come now, Volpina. Ask yourself why I would agree to that. If you’re prepared to bargain, state your terms.”

Marinette tamped down a shiver. Dealing with the devil took on a new meaning, talking to the umbral eyes of his possessed puppet. She wouldn’t hear one word of butterflies. “I don’t see how,” she replied, proud of the flatness of her voice. “We won’t give you our Miraculouses. That’s not up for discussion.”

“I wouldn’t expect otherwise.”

Marinette’s brain stuttered, but she caught herself.  What galvanized a man to unleash gratuitous terror on Paris? This was real life, not one of Alya’s comic books where the villains were evil and the heroes always won. “Then what _do_ you want?”

“As you know, each Miraculous holds its own power,” Hawkmoth explained. “The Butterfly Miraculous is pure, unfiltered empathy. I feel the pain of Paris, from its overlooked children to the homeless cast into the streets. I give them the power to change their fate.” Frustration clouded Stormy’s face like a dark nimbus. “You’re young, too young to see the bigger picture, but your actions have caused a chain of events that cannot be stopped now.”

Volpina brandished the akumatized umbrella like a sword before Marinette could form a response, pointing it at Stormy Weather’s unimpressed face. Hawkmoth leaned forward, burying the metal tip into his host’s neck. “Killing this young woman would be murder,” he warned, eyes sharp and accusing. “And would do nothing to stop me, besides. I can feel your anger, Volpina, and it’s consuming you.”

Volpina vibrated with contrition, a feeling Marinette knew well. You could hardly argue against a fallacy, or defend yourself against defensiveness without proving yourself wrong. She looked like a bottle of carbonation, shaken, and one twist of a cap from exploding messily.

Marinette put a calming hand on Volpina’s bicep, and her partner flinched. “He’s trying to get under your skin,” she whispered. She realized with dread that it was foolish to argue against an opponent who could read their hearts like open books, annotated with emotions they buried under their sleeves. They had no upper hand, no element of surprise.

Hawkmoth must have felt her resignation for Stormy Weather went limp like a marionette whose strings were snipped. She blinked as if chasing away the blur of sleep, and the violet glow about her face dimmed like an old light bulb until it flickered and died.

For the first time, an akuma left its host of its own volition. It rose on dark wings from the umbrella in Marinette’s grip, startling her into dropping it. It clattered and rolled across the floor.

Thick tears poured down Aurore’s ruddy cheeks. The dark mask was wiped clean. “No, please,” she cried. “Come back. Don’t leave me.”

 

She collected it, of course. No matter how much she wanted to shove the akuma back into its host and demand answers, she never would. She knew how an akuma could corrupt emotions. She felt it every time she purified one, taking their twisted sadness and fear and shame into herself. She wouldn’t foist that upon anyone.

But Hawkmoth could, somehow. She wished she could akumatize _him_ , and show him how it felt.

But no, that was wrong, too.

She faked purifying the akuma. Volpina was either too drained to suspect or elected to not say anything. She wasn’t sure which reality she preferred. Instead, Marinette kept the tainted butterfly suspended in her yo-yo while they cleared out the slowly melting building, while she carried people to safety and helped rescue workers do their jobs in the mess of TVi studio. Then, she said a weak good-bye to Volpina and dragged herself, exhausted, home.

She entered her bedroom through the terrace roof and hoped her parents didn’t hear her. She could only deal with one emotional fallout at a time. Ten minutes wouldn’t make their worry any worse.

Marinette pulled the akuma from her yo-yo, pinning its wings with her gloved hands. It was deceptively delicate. She wouldn’t dare touch its wings with her bare skin.

The butterfly fluttered across her palm. She scooped it up, shoved it inside a jar, and slammed the trap the moment her hands escaped. It sat still in its rudimentary glass prison.

She screwed the lid tightly shut, and then added a protective layer of ribbon, tied around and around it like a noose. It did nothing to detract from the dark form inside.

The butterfly, _akuma_ , fluttered in its inanimate vessel. Inky purple still enveloped it like a dark cloud. This was the first time Marinette had gotten a close look at one of them. She wondered how much of the real butterfly was left, if anything.

She put the jar away, behind the shelves of potted plants on her the rooftop garden. The butterfly almost fit in among the vivid flowers and visiting bees.

She descended and closed the trapdoor above her. Out of sight, out of mind. And more importantly, out of her heart. Maybe she could find a new way to cure it, but for now, it was neutralized, and that was all that mattered.  

After all, what could a trapped a akuma do?


	5. Freefall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adrien flexes his newfound wings and questions why his father’s safe housed a Miraculous. But to fly, first he will learn to fall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter went longer than planned, so I split it into two parts. Part two will probably be ready by the end of the year.

He paced the bookcases of the upper level, finger trailing across spines of CD cases and adventure novels until he reached the dusty corner where old textbooks went to die. It was in the swapped jacket of Precalculus 7th Edition where he had hidden it in plain sight: the Miraculous book.

Adrien couldn’t read it. The characters appeared Mandarin, but were a dialect too old for him to translate, and he was always better with the verbal component of languages anyway. He took care to make sure—for possibly the fifth time—that his bedroom door was locked. He had fought Father tooth and nail to give him the privacy of a interior lock. His father argued that an inaccessible room could prove a safety hazard, but Adrien frankly didn’t care for that explanation.

He sat on the plush red carpeting of his library floor, spine against spine with the books, and placed the heavy tome on his lap. He paged through the illustrations—his only context. Duusu floated over like a dandelion catching a lazy breeze and peered over his shoulder.

Adrien stopped at Dusuu’s section. A victorian-looking gentleman wore blue hose, a vibrant feathered cape, and a mask that would not be out of place at a Mardi Gras festival. Just like Dusuu, he resembled a peacock. He carried a rapier at his side, a gentleman’s weapon.

He turned the page and was greeted by a young girl with dark hair and eastern facial features flying across the page like a hang glider. There was no mistaking the broad, sapphire and teal wings gilded with unblinking eyes.

“That’s your power, isn’t it?” Adrien turned to the kwami whose shadow bobbed on the page. “Like with Ladybug. You transform people into superheroes.”

“I told you,” he said with a bow, “I am the personification of beauty and grace, and grant the powers of of such. You need only say the words.”

Adrien sat up straight. If he had known, he would have brought Dusuu to TVi. He might have been able to help instead of being whisked away by his bodyguard while his friends were in danger.

“What words?”

Dusuu held up a paw-like limb. Annoyance flicked across his face, there and gone again. “I’ll tell you—you know I have to—but first I should explain some things.”

“Like why you were in my Father’s safe?”

Dusuu gave him a look to curdle milk. “No.”

Adrien knew cheap jewelry from expensive, but Dusuu’s brooch wasn’t just high quality, it was powerful and priceless. His father had to know that it wasn’t just harmless bauble, not with the fireworks display Dusuu gave Adrien. Especially now, with a ladybug and fox superhero in broad daylight.

Adrien’s fingers traced the ridged edges of the brooch’s tail. “Ladybug and Volpina must have a,” he searched for the word, “a kwami, too, don’t they? And... Hawkmoth?”

“Aren't you just full of questions?” Duusu drawled. His tail unfurled and the dark sclera of his eyes looked fierce wearing a glare, diminutive size notwithstanding. “Let’s say I am not allowed to speak to the business of other kwamis.

“And I was in that, that safe because there was no one willing or able to use my powers. As I was trapped there for ten years, you can see why I would object to being locked away again, non?”

Adrien bit his lip and nodded. He understood.

“Good.” At once, Dusuu’s puffed up feathers settled, downsizing him by half. A smile once more stretched his blueberry face, making him resemble a plush toy. “Now, Adrien, how comfortable are you with heights?”

He glanced over at the rock wall that climbed up to his ceiling. “Pretty good,” he demurred.

“If you tell me ‘tails unfurl,’ I will transform you,” Dusuu said, “but-”

Adrien shaped the words

“-listen first!” Dusuu gave his an exasperated look and Adrien ducked his head.

He was so eager to be a hero—like Ladybug and Volpina—that he was getting ahead of himself. He mumbled an apology.

Dusuu sighed. “I need to know, Adrien. Why did you wake me up? Why do you want my power?”

“I-I didn’t even know you were in that brooch! I saw it in my Father’s chest with the book and I thought-”

Dusuu’s stare was like a microscope. It made Adrien squirm.

“-I thought it might have been Mom’s.”

He picked up the brooch and held it up to the light. The iridescent facets of it trapped the sun and threw it back in a dazzling imitation of stained glass. It was just the thing she would have worn.

When she was still with them, his mom loved flashy jewelry like that: gemmed accents that complemented cool undertones. Father would spin compliments like spider’s silk, how the green would bring out the teal color of her eyes or how it stood against the honeyed blonde of her hair.

His fist tightened around the brooch. Why would Father have this? Had he bought it? Stolen it?

The possibilities rose in his mind like ice cubes bobbing to the surface of a glass of water. Had his mom been a superhero?

When he was a little boy, in this big, empty house at night, he used to pretend that the creaks of wooden floor and flapping curtains were the work of benevolent ghosts. The highest window was always kept open, even at night. He remembered it because of how hot the attic was when he allowed up there, stifling if not for the breeze.

But he another memory, buried beneath the alluvium of grief. Nathalie, the cook, and the housekeeper had all been dismissed for the evening, leaving only his family. That night, the big window was closed tightly shut. Adrien knew it in his bones—he woke to the sound of the large tree outside like a gnarled hand against the glass, knocking to be let in.

It was also the last time he saw his mother.

He’d been six years old, cherubic fat cheeks and blonde hair that was nearly white. His bare feet padded quietly down the cold steps in the twilight hour, on a valiant quest for a glass of water. If he touched the smooth wood of the railing, he reasoned, no late night monsters would be allowed to touch him. He wound a laeotropic spiral downstairs and spotted her from the landing.

She was at the door, a bulky bag slung around her shoulder. It looked like it was stuffed with every piece clothing she owned—and she owned quite a lot. She was cycling through the foyer closet of coats, deciding on a white leather bomber and slipping it on.

Adrien rubbed his tired eyes. “Mom? Are we going on a trip?”

She stiffened, her back still to him. “No,” she said. Her voice was carefully cold as ice water. “You’re staying here with your father, where it’s safe.”

“Why can’t I come?” Adrien whined with all the indignance of a six-year-old feeling discluded. His parents went on ‘business trips’ but never together, and they never took him along.

Her hands clasped tightly around her bag, mangling the leather strap in her fist. She had her back to him, spine straight as a ruler, unbending. She was like this sometimes—bouts of cold like an ocean current—there and gone again before the change becomes familiar. She reached a hand to her face, then let it fall.

When she turned around, her expression was implacable. Adrien went to her for comfort, grabbing for her hands, but she pulled them to her chest as if burned.

He pouted. “Mom….”

“Go back to bed, Adrien.”

“I don’t want to go to bed,” he complained. “I want to go with you.”

“No, Adrien.” Her usually effervescent voice flattened as if under a rolling pin. “I’m going, and you’re staying here, and there will be no arguing about it.”

Adrien clenched his tiny fists and whined, a hair’s trigger from bursting into tears.

His mom turned her back to him again, heels clacking against the hard floor. The early moonlight pooled across her blonde updo, making it look white.

His insides felt like a melted milkshake. He wiped a hand over his runny eyes and tried to see her face, but his mom refused to meet his eyes. She opened the door, and the silver moonlight cast her pale skin as a ghost. She left just as silently.

One year later they buried an empty casket.

 

Adrien surged to his feet. The household had changed since then; there was no use denying it. He had barreled through the shock—like a bolt of lightning through his chest—and railed against anger, screaming ugly tantrums at his father like only a child could; and eventually slipped into the monotony of homeschooling, accepting the upside down world as normal. His father was content to close his eyes, but Adrien would not tolerate his blindfold anymore.

He reached to his eyes and found tears there, light as a feather’s touch. He brushed them aside. Something had to change. He felt like a black hole had grown in his stomach, growing wider every day, but because it begun so small he hadn’t thought it urgent until it was too big to ignore. Home was miserable.

All of his responsibilities—things his father had thrust upon him—had been only distractions, like a cat chasing a red laser light and never catching it. Fencing wasn’t his choice, though he did enjoy it now. Modelling, Chinese—those were his father’s choices for him. Now, Adrien was making his own choice.

He was suddenly eager to say the words, to let Dusuu make him the hero he'd always wanted to be. Comic books and anime, they had been his life preservers, keeping him afloat. But maybe he could toss hope to buoy others. He would be a superhero.

“Dusuu, tails unfurl!”

He jumped back as Dusuu exploded, shattering into thousands of shards of brilliant light. The light was a technicolor wave of blues and greens and purples. It scattered, and Adrien shivered as the light surrounded him. It didn’t give off heat, but it tingled like a feather running up and down his bare skin, turning it to gooseflesh.

He blinked rapidly as his vision shifted as if on an axis. A mask calcified around his face, tinted lenses fitting over his eyes. The world was awash with color, each more vibrant that he’d ever seen. It was if he was color blind all his life and now he was seeing a rainbow for the first time.

He lifted an arm and stared at the feathers covering it—fine, downy, and blue. He dug his fingernail gently into the quill and felt the pressure on his skin beneath the layer of costume. The feathers trailed down both arms and hung like a cape.

Adrien ran instinctively to the nearest mirror. He admired his reflection as might a preening bird. His blonde hair had highlights of royal blue and had grown longer. The dichromatic locks stuck up above his brow and the dip of his mask. The face of the metal gleamed like freshly polished silverware and drew focus to his eyes—as startlingly red and black as Dusuu’s.

He felt off-kilter, as if looking at himself through a funhouse mirror. His cape was long enough to resemble a skirt, and parted into coattails like tailfeathers. He gave an experimental twirl. The blues whispered with greens, and dozens of whirling eyespots winked at him.

A grin spread across his face. Not a cape. Wings.

He raised his arms high as if performing jumping jacks, and his wingspan spread wide. He turned to admire them. The sunlight streaming through his window lit the blues and brought out the green undertones. He flapped them again, faster, and saw a blur of wings.

Could he fly?

He probably should’ve asked Dusuu that before transforming, but Adrien wouldn’t give this moment of discovery up for anything. With a fit of impulsivity, he ran to his indoor rock wall and began to climb.

It was a bit awkward, climbing with unwieldy wings beneath his arms, but Adrien was practiced at the wall. Handhold and foothold he made his way up until he clung to the topmost rung, admiring his bedroom from the vantage point of a bird.

He shifted, resting his full weight on steady footholds, and let his hands release the wall. With the extra weight hanging under his arms, his equilibrium shifted. He counterbalanced and nearly overcompensated. His left hand flashed back to its handhold, and he let out a half-eager breath. His stomach felt like the end result of an episode of Will It Blend?.

He closed his eyes. The sensory overload of his newly opened crayonbox faded. It was just his body, a honed tool. In fencing, he required total control in order to best his opponents. But flying was not a skill, it was an instinct.

Adrien opened his eyes and leaped from his rock wall, wings spread wide.

His momentum carried him across his room. The motion ruffled his feathers with undercurrents of air. He laughed in giddy excitement as he soared, and flapped his wings. Then, the momentum faltered. Adrien flapped harder.

“The floor is lava!” he screeched.

Despite certain doom by imaginary lava, he fell, careening head and shoulders into the back of his couch. The impact rattled his head around like a can of loose bolts. He blinked ultraviolet spots from his eyes and laughed. He flew! Even for a moment, he flew.

He rapped a knuckle against his mask and giggled giddily at the resounding echo. It curved just over his nose like a beak.

He stood up, brushed himself off. He flapped his wings again, testing their weight. The diaphanous eyes of the plumage stared back at him, as if demanding “You call that flying?”

Adrien ascended the rock wall again. After all, you had to fall before you could fly.

 

As Adrien climbed, his footsteps echoed off the cavernous stairwell walls. Duusu was cradled in his jacket pocket. Motionless, he looked like a bobble-headed stuffed animal. Yet Adrien heard a phantom security guard behind every noise and flash of light, a light’s beam away from discovering his kwami and somehow putting five and x together and arriving at the right answer.

He reached the door sooner than his worries. Duusu spread his wings and flew from his pocket. The red sclera of his eyes glinted in the low glow of the emergency lights.

Adrien tried the handle. It stubbornly didn’t budge. Well, okay then.

He was ready. It shouldn’t matter when. Despite Dusuu’s flair for the dramatic, Adrien didn’t need a flashy entrance.

...he just sorta wanted one, that’s all.

“Are you ready?” Dusuu asked.

Adrien eyed the stairs below—free and clear. He straightened his shirt collar and nodded briskly. Go time.

“Dusuu, transform me.”

Just as before, Dusuu atomized into blinding blue light, sparkling with greens and purples like stars in an unquiet sea. His light surrounded Adrien, dimming gradually to reveal feathers of fluorescent hues. Adrien’s vision shifted as the beaked mask grew over his nose like a helmet. He spread his arms and the fibrous wings between his arms unfurled, feathery and royal blue. He flapped them experimentally, and a small gust of wind rustled the fine, nearly flat feathers of his legs.

He closed his eyes. He had practiced this, using his new powers, and he was ready. “Dusuu, covert feathers!” He felt his stomach drop and his body grow almost weightless, as if a stiff breeze could send him floating off into the stratosphere. Without opening his eyes, he pushed himself off the wall and ran headlong at the closed door.

When he had barreled five sprint-long strides without sending his helmet ringing with impact, he opened his eyes to find himself on the other side, unharmed. The late afternoon sky opened up for him, clouds blushing rosy cheeks and the early moon hanging in the sky like a preview of night.

“Dusuu, did you see—” Oh, right. Adrien's face warmed. There was no Dusuu to teach him here. It was just him, a rooftop, and all of Paris spread out below him. They had agreed that dusk was the best time to practice, offering enough light to see and covering his presence from from Paris’ radar until he was ready—though he and Duusu used different metrics of “ready.”

He rose onto the balls of his feet and fell, rose and fell. Out of the sunset, the birdsong gave way to silence. The city lights glowed like fireflies trapped in prisms of stone and steel. He picked out a light from the starscape and made it his North Star. Then he jumped.

His stomach plummeted first, just as his boot pushed off from the roof’s edge. The rest of him swiftly followed. He slipped into the delicate precipice between gravity and thrust. The muscles in his chest strained as he held his spread wings steady. Nature alchemized his plummet into a glide.

Practicing in the privacy and safety of his bedroom was one thing, this was another animal entirely. Nothing could have prepared him for being thirty meters in the air with nothing between him and the ground. Warm currents of wind carded through his feathers, carrying him steadily through the air. A helpless laugh bubbled up within him, and he wedded it to sound. He was weightless.

Even with his powers, eventually Adrien had to answer to gravity’s beck and call. He started to dip in the air as he lost momentum. He took a deep breath. Here came the hard part—landing. He had practiced that, too, but falling was very different three meters up than thirty. He found his North Star again—the pale yellow light of a cafe window—and tilted his body towards it, angling his wings and pulling them closer. His heartbeat sped up as he fell down.

Twenty meters and falling.

Fifteen meters and falling.

Ten meters.

Ten meters.

He overtook the building, still too high to safely drop. He flapped his wings harder and kept his body rigid and searched for a new focal point. He stalled. A skyscraper rose up several buildings down the row. If he didn’t lift or slow, he would crash into the windows like a pigeon with vertigo.

He tucked his knees to his chest, turning his body into a cannonball with wings. Wind whistled and whipped through his feathers as he descended faster and faster. At the last moment, he let his feet drop and skid against the slanted roof below him. His boots and the shingles protested the friction between them with a discordant scraping sound. He nearly bit his tongue.

When at last his momentum gave up with a sigh, Adrien let himself fall the last spare centimeters onto his back. The stars above were a connect-the-dots of white light. He could never see them shine so brightly when he usually stargazed, but with the Miraculous it was if he were looking through a cheap but functional telescope. A sappy grin spread across his face.

He could fly. There was nothing stopping him—not his Father, not Nathalie, not even gravity—from becoming a superhero. Like Ladybug. He could protect people, give them hope. Fight crime and akumas and bullies. He had the power now.

At least, that was the plan.

 

⚠ EMERGENCY ALERT

AKUMA: unidentified 30-year-old male,

last seen at Rue des Petites Écuries, Paris

 

There was an akuma in the news, and Adrien was halfway across the city when it happened.

After the fourth attack in as many weeks, Mayor Bourgeois had called a press conference to address the ongoing attacks on the city. The city’s solution? An early akuma alert system that coordinated the Paris Police Prefecture with their resident superheroines. An emergency alert promptly informed citizens when and where an akuma attack took place, advising them to find the nearest shelter and remain indoors until the danger passed.

Adrien had the alert on his phone, and so when it flashed a warning of an akuma attacking downtown, he begged a break from the photography director of his photoshoot and hid in an empty dressing room. It was easy to transform and access the studio’s vacant rooftop, but trickier to find his next vaulting point.

He made his way downtown in short glides and long transitions, climbing up buildings then gliding to the next one, rinse and repeat until his cheeks perspired with sweat. Ladybug and Volpina made rooftop parkour look effortless, but his wings made climbing awkward and slow, and gliding only worked when he had the advantage of height and a running start to carry him aloft.

By the time he had reached downtown square, there were sirens and police tape and the wake of property damage minimized to shattered lampposts and knocked over flower beds, dirt sprayed across the cobblestones. Adrien slumped against the side of his rooftop perch, helmet meeting the concrete with an indignant thunk. Ladybug and Volpina had already taken care of the threat.

Paris’ heroines had left the scene of the attack, leaving Adrien without even a chance to introduce himself. Paramedics tended a man, his shoulders cradled in a bright yellow shock blanket. The former akuma maybe? The police seemed to think so—an officer spoke to the man, stylus scribbling down notes into a tablet. Besides the intermittent whoop whoop of the sirens, the street front lacked the bustle of midday commuters and shoppers.

Despite his instincts telling him to hurtle down to the street, Adrien perched on the roof in a crouch with his arms tucked close to his body. The feathers across his shoulders tickled at his face, and he watched and listened.

Gradually, tentatively, people emergence from their hiding places, exiting single file and returning to their schedules and errands as if the akuma had paused life with a button and Ladybug and Volpina had pressed play again. A mother led her child by the hand; a businessman resumed a bluetooth conversation, downing a large cup of coffee; and a gaggle of tourists wrapped in t-shirts bustled, bandying shopping bags and loud conversation.

From his faraway perch, Adrien could see every detail: the crushed flowers lying in the street, the fist-sized dent in a brick wall, and the haunted look drawn over the victim’s face like a stormcloud. In the time it took him to arrive at the scene—a feat of no less than ten minutes—Ladybug and Volpina had literally beat him to the punch and left the scene just as swiftly as they triumphed.

He pulled out his phone, tucked conveniently in the band of his belt hidden beneath the feathers and found the old alert gone. He searched the address www.Ladyblog.fr. On the homepage, there was a short blurb, a pre-article that Alya often wrote when she was stuck between a rock and a hard place with news and school demanding her priority. It laid out the fight; Ladybug took out a villain with a Midas touch who was turning the city to gold. Thankfully he was stopped before he could turn his alchemy on people.

Alya wasn’t at the scene of the attack or Adrien would have seen her. So how did she know the details of the fight so quickly? Without a Miraculous, there was no way she could have gotten downtown before he did. He carded his fingers through the downy soft feathers at his nape.

Unless she did have a Miraculous. He returned to the Ladyblog and clicked over to the forums page. There was a dedicated forum specifically to uncovering Ladybug and Volpina’s identities; yet when Adrien looked for it now, the forum was gone—deleted. His fingers crushed a loose feather like a flower petal. He googled their pictures. Ladybug was much too pale to be Alya, but Volpina… It was possible. He stowed his phone and began a beleaguered journey back to photography studio. It was quicker on the return trip—he glided from high to low, letting the wind carry him like water traveling downriver.

In the dressing room, Adrien detransformed. His feathers fell from him as if he were in a molt, fading to fractals of light before they hit the ground. The tenuous light coalesced into a technicolor sphere, and after Adrien blinked the miasma of spots from his eyes, Duusu bobbed there, drooping like a balloon that had siphoned off its helium.

“I think we need to work on your takeoffs, darling,” said Duusu kindly.

Adrien twisted his short locks in hand and paced tight lines between hanging racks of clothes. His catalogue sneakers squeaked against the faux wood floor. “How do they get there so fast? Are they connected to Hawkmoth somehow?” That would explain how an attack usually seemed to end before there were casualties—excepting a few early but notable outliers.

Dusuu’s mouth turned down in a frown, but on his bulbous face it more resembled a pout. “We’re not telephones, you know.”

Adrien crossed his arms, then winced. Even from that relatively brief flight, the muscles in his chest and arms ached like he’d done a hundred push-ups. He was glad he’d avoided bruising—explaining that to the photography director would be more pain than bearing them. He put all thoughts of superheroism aside, for now. If he didn’t keep the life of Adrien Agreste in perfect order, his superhero métier would be over before it started.

 

Two weeks passed without incident.

While Adrien was glad Paris was given a reprieve, the lack of akumas made it even more difficult to track Ladybug and Volpina down. The city was huge and they seemingly moved through it like ghosts, leaving barely a whisper of their presence behind. The Ladyblog proved equally unhelpful.

Despite his best efforts, Adrien couldn’t manage to escape the notice of dad and friends and bodyguard again until the weekend. After his fencing lessons, he kept on his fencing mask and slipped out in relative anonymity among the other identically-dressed students. He felt a twinge of guilt for leaving the Gorilla waiting for him—especially after protecting him and his friends at TVi—but he needed freedom from disturbance and interference.

When he crossed the street and turned around the corner, he pulled off his fencer’s mask, and the city’s sounds and sights unmuffled—foot traffic of the masses making a muddled beat and honking cars that Nino could probably find a melody in, but Adrien disappeared into like a surplus shadow. Stealth was one arena in which Adrien succeeded his superhero persona. A peacock was not a subtle animal.

When he found an alleyway free and clear, Adrien passed the baton and Paon Bleu took to the skies.

He searched for them as a falcon watches for rival hawks—flying high with sharp eyes and sharper concentration. The duo were like passing police sirens, there and gone again before Adrien barely registered their presence. But his intuition didn’t need tuning, the Ladyblog confirmed—Ladybug and Volpina were stopping akumas with both less frequency and greater efficiency. Where once a battle with a supervillain might take hours, now Paris’ heroes had them thoroughly routed and cured in the time it took the police to cordon off the area with fluttering yellow tape. The akuma alert had been silent for weeks.

His tracking wasn’t fully in vain. He was getting stronger with every flight, learning the bones and beauty marks of the city, the tall buildings to take off from and which boroughs had long stretches of level houses to make use as a runway. The city had become his playground.

With wings outstretched, Adrien felt wind and freedom pull him forward, and he closed his eyes as if he were at the peak revolution of a swingset. That same exhilarating dizzy feeling, that addictive vertigo, took hold of him like a helpless joy. And just like joy, he reveled in the feeling with a hunger that startled him. He needed to fly. On days where he couldn’t slip away, so frequent in the weeks after finding Duusu, his head buzzed unhappily, arms aching with the phantom pains of wings bereft.

He needed to capture the public’s eyes. He was a peacock trying to be predator, and his quarry were two apex predators in their own right. He couldn’t reach them before they disappeared into their secret identities. So, he would do what peacocks did best and strut his feathers. Except that never happened.

What happened instead was a case of serendipity calling the wrong number.

Adrien was flying across the Paris sky, making his way towards the Eiffel Tower—he and Duusu didn’t spare time for subtlety—when a dark figure swooped down from a building in the horizon, wings casting a silhouette across the canvas of blue sky. The UFO—because he hadn’t identified it yet—glided down and perched upon a distant roof, a speck in Adrien's enhanced sight. He had seen his fair share of pigeons through aerial view, and this was no pigeon.

He glided towards the person, wings tucking gradually closer to his body as the distance between them narrowed. The figure must have spotted him, because they drew an object that reflected sunlight into Adrien’s eyes. He raised his hands to block the glare and a projectile shot at him like a leaping snake. He shrieked and barrel-rolled mid-air, tipping himself from his trajectory. The projectile whizzed past on a sturdy cord. Without thinking, Adrien grasped it.

The line went taut. Losing momentum, Adrien plummeted with the speed of a meteorite crashing to Earth. The figure reeled him in like a gasping fish before Adrien could let go. He fell halfway between a dead weight and a reeled in catch, swinging into the broad side of the building. His shoulders absorbed the brunt of the impact, jarring against the brick wall.

Dangling, he drew three sharp breaths. There was a moment of stalemate as he held onto the rope and the rope stayed stationary. There was a hook at the end of it. A grappling hook.

Adrien pushed off from the bricks as if he were ascended an indoor rock climbing wall and uses the momentum of his swing to move closer to the adjacent building. He let go at the peak of the swing and caught himself on the rail of a rickety fire escape with a clang.

He scrambled up the fire escape and made it to the roof. The figure stood on the building opposite, holding their reeled in grappling hook like a threat. The two of them stared each other down. Somehow, Adrien had found an akuma without even trying. Unlike at TVi, this time he had a fighting chance.

The akuma took several generous steps back, then ran across the roof in a takeoff Adrien knew in his bones. Later, he might laugh at how green he had been. He would certainly regret his next actions. He copied the movements—run, takeoff, glide—and met the akuma in the air.

They tumbled like laundry in a washing machine, Adrien falling wing over head. The part of his brain that channeled Duusu panicked at the loss of control. He flapped madly against his assailant. The figure dug into him with knives or claws or something sharp and piercing bare pinpricks of pain through Adrien’s costume, and Adrien shrieked.

They fell.

Adrien was now an expert at falling from great heights. He twisted and hugged the akuma. They were heavier than him and he clung to their chest like it was an anchor at sea; so when they fell together, the masked man hit the ground first.

Adrien closed his eyes at impact. His head rattled in his skull in his helmet, producing that susurrus ringing like his head was a struck gong. He jostled free of the akuma, somersaulting with arms and wings splayed wide. His half-gloved hands hit the black of the pavement and halted his frenzied fall.

The man behind him made a deep oof followed by a more pronounced groan of pain. Adrien rose shakily to his feet. The bones of his legs felt unexpectedly brittle, like they had been replaced with sticks. He winced and spread his stance wider, relying on his cape’s tailfeathers to keep his tethered to gravity.

The man was short for an adult. He had a soft gut and a physique made bigger by fluffy brown and cream-colored feathers covering body and cape—cleft into wings which he pulled tight to his body. The man groaned again and rolled fully onto his back, and his wings unfurled, stretched out with a wingspan greater than Adrien’s. His mask was the face of an owl, a series of concentric circles and tufts of feathers sticking up like bushy grey eyebrows, imparting his face a perpetual fierce glare. His eyes were closed, and his true expression was an enigma until he turned his amber eyes on Adrien. His dark pupils went wide, nearly turning his whole eyes black.

Adrien backed up a few shakey steps, foot catching on his wing-cape. He collapsed backward onto his backful of feathers, biting back an undignified yelp. The owl man and Adrien stared at each other, both laying heavy on the ground.

With a huff of effort, the man hefted his topheavy body to a crouch. Adrien copied his movements as if in a trance. His tail feathers fanned out, displaying its canvas of peeping eyes. “Who are you?” he asked.

For a long moment, the man only watched. Then, he blinked and said, “You can call me the Owl.” His voice was rough with age and sharp with the pitch of an owl’s hoot. His head spun as if on an axis, an uncanny movement that made Adrien draw back in unease.

“I am Paris’s vigilante of justice,” Owl proclaimed. “sworn to stop akumas like you from terrorizing Paris!” He spread his wings like curtains, throwing Adrien into shadow.

Adrien reached for the hard quill of his tail feathers where they attached at the hip. He plucked it loose and tightened his grip on the hilt. Ladybug had her yo-yo, Volpina her flute, and the Peacock had tricks of his own. “I’m not an akuma.” Adrien raised his feather blade in a defensive stance. “But you are.”

Owl chuckled heartily. “Oh, my dear boy. What makes you think I would fall for a trick like that?” He reached for his waist where a belt held pouches of different shapes and sizes and pulled out his grappling hook, which glinted as he turned it in the light. “I am no supervillain.”

Adrien raised his blade, taking the ready stance of a fencer—shoulders straight, feet apart, and eyes sharp. He scrambled at his memory of the Miraculous book. Was there an owl superhero in the pages upon pages illustrations? If there was, he couldn’t remember. There was a chance, a chance he was wrong. “Prove it,” he challenged.

“Hey, bluebird!”

Adrien turned to the voice. He pivoted, and an orange blur of a person bodychecked him in the shoulder, sending him off balance. He pushed back against his assailant, forgetting the blade in his hand, and the girl shrieked as it cut across her arm.

She burst into movement, ducking and sweeping his legs out from under him. He toppled, his boot coming down on her ankle and he swore as he fell onto her—Volpina, his brain helpfully supplied.

He was heavier than her, body weighed by his cloak of wings. Her claws made a tearing noise as she ripped through the feathers, which blunted the sting of it on his skin. “Hold on, wait,” he blurted. “I don’t want to fight you!” He shoved her away, but her claws caught in his collar and she yowled, loud and jarringly close to his ears. “Stop, you’re stuck on my—oww!” She kicked him in the ribs, using boot-on-chest to boost herself backwards into a graceful tuck and roll.

As soon as she was on her feet again, she slinked down to hands and feet and her body coiled back into itself like a loaded spring. Adrien sheathed his feather blade and held up his hands placatingly. “Stop!”

There was a mad shuffle of movement behind him, but he dared not tear his eyes from Volpina. “There he is,” shouted the Owl, “the vile akuma who was stalking me! Help me stop him, Ladybug!”

“Monsieur Damo-”

“A-hem, Owl!”

“-Owl… we’ve been over this before. You need to call us when you see an akuma. Don’t try to fight them on your own.”

Adrien’s head whipped to face them. Ladybug was helping the Owl to his feet, her face tense with concern. Adrien caught her eyes, blue eyes, for the first time. She felt at once familiar, but when he tried to place her face, the thought slipped from his head like sand through a sieve.

Volpina didn’t waste her opening. She launched herself at him while he blinked the hero worship from his eyes. She punched the breath from his lungs. Even with his feathers protecting him from feeling the brunt of her claws, he was sure to have a map of bruises across his back by morning. He headbutted her in the chin. His metal mask clanged against the edge of her jawbone. Adrien turned on her axis and stepped back, triangulating himself between a snarling Volpina and the space where Ladybug and the Owl now faced him.

Blood gushed from Volpina’s nose and trailed down her face messily. It turned her already striking face fierce. She drew the back of her hand across her face, making the black fur of her gloves shiny and matted with blood.

Adrien winced in sympathy and a slowly dawning horror. He had made Volpina bleed. Facing her and Ladybug was impossible, and more so because he didn’t want to fight either of them. “Oh no.” The words dribbled from him. He tried again to diffuse the situation, babbling, “I’m so sorry. Please, I don’t want—”

With a sound like a measuring tape retracting, Ladybug’s yo-yo wrapped itself around and around him. He flexed to break free, but the cord was seemingly infinite, and as soon as it covered his legs, Adrien fell, trussed up like a turkey before a feast. This time his hands couldn’t break his fall, and his head hit the pavement hard. His ears rung and ultraviolet vision blossomed into what Adrien could have sworn were even more new colors, an unfolding kaleidoscope—but that might have been because of the pain spreading across his head like fire.

“Thanks for finally joining the fight,” Volpina complained. Her voice sounded nasally, as if she were holding her nose.

“I’m sorry, Volpina. You were in close range, and I didn’t want to hit you by mistake.”

“Hmphh.”

Adrien opened his eyes. Ladybug crouched over him, the Owl hovering over her shoulder and shuffling from foot to foot. Ladybug frowned and gave Owl a sharp look, and he gave her space.

Ladybug looked over at Volpina, who was just outside of Adrien’s field of view. He tried to turn his head, but moving made the pain flare behind his skull.

“Did you see his akuma?” she asked.

“I’m not an akuma,” Adrien protested.

Ladybug gave him a stern look, but didn’t dignify him with a reply.

“It’s in his brooch,” said the Owl. “I almost had it before Mademoiselle Volpina—”

“Oh, yeah. You looked like you’re were just cleaning up,” drawled Volpina. She spat at the ground, spraying it with droplets of red. “Funny, that picture of you falling from the sky disagrees.”

“Volpina,” Ladybug warned. She leaned in close. She smelled like chocolate and freshly poured asphalt. She reached for his neck.

“Please, don’t. I’m not who you think I am.”

“Don’t worry. This will be over soon.”

Adrien thrashed as soon as her hand touched his brooch. Why wouldn’t they just listen? He rolled, desperate to get away and preserve his identity. That was the deal. He had promised Duusu he would be careful, and not compromise his identity, his safety. He couldn’t lose this.

Screwing his eyes shut tight, the world of bright and swirling colors died and he could think clearer. He would try again, explain himself better next time. They would see. They were heroes; they had to know he wasn’t a villain. And now he knew better than to face the Owl if he wasn’t a villain either.

“Covert feathers!” he shouted. It was a last resort. Adrien shivered as his body went intangible and Ladybug’s coils of string fell through him. He stood, putting careful thought into keeping his feet solid with the ground. Owl and Ladybug stared at him in shock. “Sorry, Ladybug,” he mumbled.

He ran straight at her, and when she dodged aside, he hit the building behind her, phased through the wall, and disappeared in the architecture, breath pushing through his lungs.

He had five minutes.

Adrien and Duusu had timed it out carefully with a stopwatch, making certain how long he could stay transformed after using his secondary power. He had five minutes—five minutes to escape before he exposed himself.

Five minutes to run.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Out of the quiet  
> Out of the sunrise  
> I hear the birdsong  
> Give way to sirens”
> 
> (Birdsong, Regina Spectator)


	6. Little White Lie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After his intentions are misunderstood, Adrien must find a way to convince Ladybug and Volpina that he’s not an akuma.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s been awhile since I last updated. I hope people are still interested in this story.

He called Gorilla to pick him up. There was no response over the phone except a sigh of relief. Adrien waited on a public bench outside a nearby Five Guys, his legs swinging aimlessly. He stared at the sidewalk with its imprint of tiny squirrel feet and tried not to throw up.

A hazy amount of time later, the family limousine pulled up to the curb. Adrien’s expression must have been pitiful, because Gorilla didn’t even ask about why he had run away or where his gym bag was—on a rooftop, and Father would probably ground him twice over for that mistake. Instead there was a stony silence all the the way home. Adrien’s stomach felt like a washing machine full of rocks.

Gorilla kept looking at him. He was pretending not to, keeping his eyes on the road, mostly, but at red lights he glanced at Adrien through the rear-view mirror. Gorilla was always like that, quietly observant, but right then it made Adrien feel like a bug trapped under a microscope. It was a long half hour, watching himself being watched.

He didn’t complain when Gorilla had the foresight to open up the limousine window seconds before Adrien emptied his stomach, hands clammy and clutched against the rim. His stomach clenched in painful spasms. He closed his eyes at the sight of his vomit on the door sliding down the gleaming black exterior. His eyes watered with the effort to keep his breaths even.

The partition between the driver’s seat and passenger's cab slid down, and Gorilla passed him a bottled water. Adrien took it with a grateful nod, afraid to open his mouth again to speak. He took small sips of the water.

Natalie was waiting in ambush at home, confronting him like a fox pouncing on a wounded rabbit. “Adrien, thank god.” Her face was pinched with worry and frustration and Adrien shrinked from both. “Where _were_ you?”

He swallowed past the burn in his throat, pleading his stomach not to act out again. There was no way he could answer that question without turning up the dial on his hot seat. Nathalie stared daggers at him, disappointment dragged across a whetstone. She faced his bodyguard and said crisply, “and why did you just let him wander off?”

Gorilla snorted. His hands gestured deliberately. Adrien understood the spirit of the words if not the letter. _A-D-R-I-E-N left gym after practice_ , he signed. _Called me thirty minutes ago._

Nathalie pinched the bridge of her glasses that framed her nose. “Adrien, go to your room. You will stay there until dinner.”

Adrien wasn’t going to argue with that. His head swam with building pressure—the ache had gone from a dull complaint to endless fire blossoming between his eyes and riding up the crown of his head. He was swaying sleep-desperate on his feet, about two minutes away from laying right there on the floor.

“Does… does Father know?”

“...No.”

At his incredulous stare, she added. “Your Father doesn’t need another excuse that your extracurricular activities are unsafe or lead to this kind of behavior.” Her limousine black flats tapped the polished tile of the foyer, giving a sharp _click click click_.

“Thank you, Nathalie,” he said quietly. The words tasted like bile. She was right—he had to be more careful, but not for the reason she thought. He had Duusu now to protect him from danger. It was the parental consequences of staying out on his own that he had to tiptoe around like a primed landmine. It was thanks to Nathalie’s mediation that he had avoided detonating one already.

Released from his scolding like a chastised dog, Adrien retreated to his room. The stairs up to the second floor were too long due to their mere existence. He was careful not to show even a hint of a wince, despite his legs protesting every movement, mindful of Nathalie and the Gorilla’s eyes following him.

His bedroom was dark and quiet. He didn’t even bother taking off his shoes before face-planting into his mattress. He closed his eyes against the resulting headrush. Vertigo made the room wobble and tilt like it was puzzle box and his head was the marble spinning through the maze. He buried his head into his pillow. The pillowcase was cool and soft against his skin.

Sleep gave way to sound. At first, he thought the ringing was the last impression of a retreating dream. Then it rang again—the doorbell. It took him a moment to remember what and where and why. He was in his bedroom, sprawled on his stomach like a starfish. Day had broken through the large windows, leaving a square of sunlight across the wood floor.

He remembered the clock by his nightstand and blinked at the neon digital time, numbers blurring in and out of focus as if he needed glasses. Ten… ten thirty-two? He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept in so late, even on a weekend.

God, he hoped it was still the weekend. His body felt like it had been doing all kinds of sleepwalking and sleep-fighting and sleep-dancing while his brain was turned off. He rolled onto his back and tensed as a wave of pain radiated through the muscles. He put a hand to his back and gently pressed against the tender skin there. He felt the sense memory of falling hard onto his back as if he had fallen back into that moment. His breath escaped him in a quiet groan.

“Adrien, are you awake?” said a soft voice.

He couldn’t place it, but it sounded familiar. He looked around the room, but there was no one there.

“Are you okay?”

He jumped as he heard it again, seemingly from nowhere at all. He sat up in bed, still on top of his sheets, and tried to put a name to the voice. Then, Duusu floated over, and Adrien let out a long breath. “Sorry.” His mouth tasted rancid and he grimaced around his words. “What did you say again?”

“I think you have a concussion,” Duusu said slowly. “You hit your head pretty hard yesterday.”

“Aren’t I supposed to be a superhero?”

“Yes, you are” Duusu said patiently, “but even superheroes have their limits.” Despite his flat tone, his tail quivered. “And you promised you would be careful. You should know kwamis take oaths very seriously.”

Adrien groaned before he could stop himself. He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Yeah, Duusu, I know. I wasn’t trying to—it all just went sideways, okay? I wasn’t trying to ruffle your feathers.”

“That pun certainly was a poor attempt to.”

Adrien snorted. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and let his sneakered feet hit the ground. He leveraged the shoes off his feet, pushing one off with the heel of the other and not even bothering to bend down to unlace them, and then kicked them across the floor. He stood up and stretched, ready this time for the pain across his upper back.

He padded to the bathroom, Duusu hovering behind him. Adrien asked, “who was at the door?”

“Someone in a limousine. I was more concerned about the unsightly bump on your head.”

Adrien rolled his eyes. In the reflection of his bathroom mirror, there was no telltale bump that suggested brain damage or anything as serious as that. He didn’t look his best, certainly not model pretty, but makeup could easily add more color to his cheeks and hide the dark sickles of fatigue under his eyes. He turned the tap on cold and plunged his hands into the sink, sighing as the feeling of iciness spread through his fingers.

Duusu alighted on the adjacent tap. The recessed lighting above the sink made the vibrant blues of his feathers look pale. He let a protracted sigh escape—the sound of disappointment given breath. “Yesterday was not ideal,” he began.

“Yeah, I know,” Adrien snapped. Numbness crept into his fingers. He shoved the tap off and glared at himself in the mirror. “I wasn’t _trying_ to get into a fight with Ladybug and Volpina.” His raised voice echoed off the high ceiling of the bathroom, and he gritted his teeth at the whine of it. His indignance shed like water down the drain. “I mean, why didn’t they just listen to me?”

“I don’t know. But it wasn’t your fault that they reacted the way they did.” Duusu’s voice faltered. “It was my responsibility to keep you safe. To keep you from repeating the mistakes my previous peacocks have.” He was silent for a long minute. “I’m sorry I failed you.”

Duusu turned away, leaving Adrien there with his hands still in the sink. He wasn’t sure how long he stood there with dripping wet hands. Maybe only minutes. The faint buzz of the fluorescent lights overhead sounded loud as bees in the silence. Adrien forced himself to move.

He brushed his teeth three times until the smell of something dying in his mouth was gone. After a steaming hot shower that left his skin feeling soft, his joints relaxed, Adrien felt more like a functional human being again. He sat for awhile in the bathroom, just breathing in the lingering soap smell, shivering, and dripping onto the floor. Volpina really did a number on him. Shallow scratches criss-crossed his shoulders like a necklace. Bruises trailed his ribs, ripened to an ugly eggplant color overnight. His back earned a matching set. There’s nothing to do but wait for them to heal and keep them covered. At least his face got away visibly unscathed.

He considered going back to bed. What else was there for him to do today?

When he checked his phone, the battery was dead. He plugged it in and waited impatiently for it to recharge enough to turn on again. There were unread messages waiting for him. There’s three from Nino— _did u get good notes from precalc on thurs_ and _dude what r u doing this weekend?_ And finally, two hours ago, _wanna catch a movie?_ Alya had bombarded him with excited all-caps exclamations about the latest akuma that escaped, and Adrien felt his heart go into free fall with a thin tether bungee cord. He tapped the _Ladyblog_ link she sent him and skimmed the article. It featured a picture someone had posted on the site’s Instagram page. He’s too surprised to do anything but laugh.

There they were, flying at each other like poorly coordinated drones on the front page of the _Ladyblog_ ’s Instagram account. It was tagged #superhero #akuma #akumawatch and included the time and place the picture was taken. The caption said, “Owl superhero attacked by bird akuma.” He startled at the description. That must be how Ladybug and Volpina had found him so fast, had jumped to all the wrong conclusions. Adrien typed out a defensive reply, then deleted it. He sighed. No. He couldn’t let anyone connect Adrien Agreste to his superhero identity.

He let the screen go dark and stood, starting to pace. He needed to get out of his room and _do_ something—not just wait around for Ladybug and Volpina to see that no, he really was a good guy, not a villain.

He shrugged on a jacket and went downstairs, keeping his Miraculous pinned to the inside of the jacket where it would stay hidden. There were places in the manor where his father frequented—his atelier, his bedroom, and occasionally the dining room—which Adrien avoided. After yesterday’s misadventure, it couldn’t hurt to stay on Father’s good side; and the best way to do that, he’d learned, was not to interrupt or bother him while he was working.

He headed to the kitchens instead, hoping that Chef Moreau was there or had left something for him. He hadn’t eaten last night—the queasiness that had filled his stomach left no room for food. He still felt the lingering pangs of nausea, but a growing hunger gnawing at him, too. The kitchen’s light was on, and when he pressed open the door, the sharp smell of caramelized onions enveloped him like a pleasant memory.

Chef Moreau was slicing a loaf of bread with a stainless steel knife saw-toothed with a serrated edge. That unmistakable fresh bread smell persisted like background radiation. It reminded him of Marinette; her home always smelled of bread. The kitchen door closed behind him with a muted _click_ , and Moreau looked up from her work. A smile bloomed across her prominent lips. “Here for more mangoes, Mon Chou?” she teased.

Duusu ate most fruits, but he favored mangoes most of all. Moreau had picked up on “Adrien’s” newfound obsession with the fruit and, despite her teasing, had made sure the kitchens were always stocked up on them.

He sat on the elevated stool by the counter and watched as she deftly divided the bread into slices. A racecar red skillet on the stove sizzled with onions and splash of popping oil. “What’s for breakfast?” he asked.

She chuckled. “Adrien, it’s past noon already—well past breakfast, don’t you think?” She gave him an appraising look from the corner of her eye. “Are you alright? You look a bit green about the gills.”

Adrien swallowed. His head hurt and his stomach quaked and his vision still swam with fuzzy spots like a windshield in a rainstorm. “I’m fine.”

She hmmmed thoughtfully, but didn’t interrupt her work. Chef Moreau had been part of the household staff since Adrien was just starting school. She was from Nigeria, and her accent was still strong, but you would never guess French was her third language. “It’s onion soup,” she revealed, wrapping the bread slices in blankets of foil. “Since you are usually up so early, I thought you would appreciate a comfort food.”

Adrien smiled wanly. “That sounds great.”

“Your father and his visitor,” she said as she placed the foiled bread into the oven. “Do you know if they are expecting lunch in the atelier?”

“I didn’t know he had company. Father didn’t say anything to me about it.”

His phone rang and he startled in his seat. Nino’s picture flashed across the screen. He looked to Chef Moreau and she waved at him, focused on the _slurp slurp_ beat of her spoon through the simmering broth. He answered on the second ring. “Nino?”

“Hey, dude. What happened to you?”

“Lost Saturday doing that Pre-Calc homework,” he lied. “What’s up?”

“Alya made me critique her article all afternoon yesterday,” he complained, but the smile behind his voice wasn’t fooling anyone. “She’s all excited about this new akuma.”

Adrien pretended ignorance. “What’s so special about this one?” he asked.

“Apparently there was some sort of mix-up.” There’s a click, followed by a soft EDM beat thumping in the background. Nino’s voice comes from further away, like he’s talking through speakerphone. “Alya was pulling info from the Akuma Watch. But she did a little digging and thinks that this new guy isn’t an akuma at all, that maybe he got his powers the same way Ladybug and Volpina did.”

Adrien took a moment to let that settle. So Alya was crowdsourcing her reporting from Instagram. That explained how she wrote her articles so soon after an attack. She had her finger on the pulse of the akumas. If he were Ladybug, he would be following those same channels of information.

“She hasn’t posted it yet.” he said. If she did, maybe Ladybug would see it and believe him.

“She’s probably still sifting through the akumawatch tag on Instagram, looking for the hashtag truth.” Nino’s voice went sly. “Because everyone loves to post about their hashtag heroes in hashtag Paris, especially those hashtag tourists.”

Adrien cracked a smile. “Is that hashtag instagood?”

Nino groaned. “Stop it.”

“Aren’t you hip to the lingo?” Adrien asked, grinning. “Don’t be an instagrampa, Nino.”

There’s a slapping sound. He could see it, Nino facepalming, but smiling into it, maybe sinking dramatically lower into his chair.

“Want to catch a movie?” Nino asked finally. “We could see that new Edgar Wright one.”

There was a wide pause as Adrien thought of what to say. Even though he wanted to immediately go back out as Paon and explain himself to Ladybug, he knew she wouldn’t just take him at his word, not after his disastrous debut. So there was nothing stopping him from spending time with his friend. It was better than decomposing to boredom at home. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

They decided the whens and wheres. Since neither of them had a license or a car, he would ask the Gorilla to pick his friend up and drive them together. He hung up feeling lighter. Adrien wanted to be around people. He wasn’t ungrateful for his room—with its video games and rock-climbing wall and extensive collection of anime—but it felt like a gilded cage. After living the normalcy of going to school and making more than one friend, Adrien could never return to his old life.

Moreau set a finished bowl of soup in front of him. It was dark brown, onion-laden, thyme-kissed, and steaming from the stove. A toasty, melted-cheese-covered piece of bread topped it off. Moreau usually didn’t let him eat in the kitchen, but she handed him a spoon and he accepted it with a grateful smile.

He sipped a warm spoonful and felt a layer of tension melt from like a candle wax. The bread crunched softly between his teeth, and he forced himself to slow down. As good as the food was, he didn’t want to upset his pugnacious stomach.

When he was finished, Adrien put his emptied bowl and spoon in the sink and gave Chef Moreau a brief farewell before launching a search for his bodyguard-cum-chauffeur. The Gorilla was on call for whenever Adrien left the house, but sometimes he waited for him at the house. Adrien was sliding with sock feet across the polished foyer floor when a door opened and he caught his father walking a man out of his atelier.

They hadn’t spoken since the incident at TVi. He got the impression that his father was one akuma attack away from putting Adrien back in the gilded cage where not even a butterfly could touch him. Too bad he was allergic to gold.

Father’s posture was as stiff as a mannikin. There was an awkward moment where he and the man and Adrien all stared at one another, until Gabriel adjusted his glasses and led the man towards the front door. Adrien stood still as a gazelle, applying the method of ‘if I don’t move, maybe I won’t be seen’ as if his father were a Jurassic Park dinosaur.

“Adrien.”

“Father.”

“This is Félix Lachance, a former… associate of mine.”

Father didn’t make a habit of introducing Adrien to his “associates,” keeping the business part of the family neatly squared away. This man looked the part of a businessman, wearing a coal black waistcoat and austere tie. His outfit had none of the flourishes that were the pride of Father’s fashion.

“Nice to finally meet you, Adrien,” said Mr. Lachance, stiffly offering a handshake.

He had a face made of sharp planes and angles and skin pale enough to suggest he spent more time in the dark than in daylight. Adrien shook his hand. He had a gentle grip and wore a black ring agleam on his middle finger—an ace ring, Adrien thought. Alix wore one just like it. He smiled at Adrien—neutrally, like a businessman or a someone unused to interacting with teenagers.

“Good to meet you, too, sir,” said Adrien, plastering on a polite smile.

“Yes, well.” Lachance made a show of checking his watch. “I ought to be off. I have a meeting in half a hour.”

“Good-bye, Félix,” said Father. He clasped Lachance on the shoulder and for just a moment a genuine smile appeared on his face—there and gone again before Adrien could memorize it.

“Take care, Gabriel.”

After Mr. Lachance left, Father watched him walk away through the tall storm windows of the foyer. Adrien found himself following Father’s eyes, watching until the manor’s gates were closed behind his visitor. A tension Adrien hadn’t realized was there released its hold on the room, and he let out a breath.

“Adrien,” Father began. His hands were poised behind his back. He looked at Adrien as if he could see the bruises beneath his shirt, and his frown deepened, opened from apathy to concern. When he didn’t find whatever he was looking for, he let out a little sigh and asked, “Is there anything you’d like to share with me?”

Adrien matched his Father’s blank expression. Did his Father know that Adrien had skipped out after practice yesterday? Adrien weighed honesty and little white lies on a scale. If he told the truth, his punishment might be less severe. Unless Father was bluffing and only suspected something had happened.

“No, Father,” he said. “Nothing I can think of.” _Is there something you want to tell_ me?

Gabriel nodded. “If that changes, I expect… I trust you to tell me. There are some things that adults are meant to handle.”

Adrien nodded dutifully, but behind his mimicked mask was an unexpected jolt of arrogance. He could protect himself. He had more power than Father did now. And together, he and Duusu could handle anything the world threw at them.

 

He was on the self-admitted No Fly List for the next few days. He missed the feeling of gliding, but knew that as soon as he took to the skies, Ladybug and Volpina would find him. They were watching for him now. So, he riffled through his old toy chest and found a pair of binoculars. He was perched atop an apartment building, wearing his costume but keeping to the lip of the roof and out of sight. He scanned the the overcast sky as tubby gray clouds rolled overhead. Pigeons flock like a tiny paper airplanes throw into the cover of alleyways. He wondered if there was anything left of the Pigeonman’s influence, if they ever felt a subconscious urge to swarm into giant kidnapping bird spheres.

When Adrien wasn’t peering through his binoculars like a particularly overzealous birdwatcher, he checked the _Ladyblog_ ’s feeds, switching between the main blog and its Instagram page. He searched the tag for #theowl. There were images of him helping kids cross the street, saving a cat from a tree, carrying groceries for an old woman—small acts of kindness. Adrien felt jealousy bubbling up his gullet and swallowed down the feeling. There was room for two birds in Paris.

Refreshing the feed again, he almost missed it—movement from the corner of his eye. He shot to his feet. The Owl was swooping from a roof several blocks away, diving to land on the blue roof of a library. He crouched there like a wide-eyed gargoyle above the bay windows. His head spun a three-sixty, staring at the middle distance where Adrien now stood like a multichromatic beacon. Adrien slowly raised his hand and waved.

The Owl waved back.

Adrien took an indrawn breath. The air was heavy with precipitation, a wind picking up and teasing the ends of his feathers and his bangs behind the mask. He took two very large steps backwards. He expelled a heavy breath, as if that might reduce his weight enough to keep him airborne. Then, he sprinted across the roof and let himself go into freefall. Air rushed past his face as if he we on the front car of a rollercoaster. He dared to close his eyes and let his wings spread wide to embrace the air. Instead of meeting the air in a seamless dive, the wind smacked him with the impact of a belly flop. It knocked the breath from his lungs.

He plummeted into a chaotic spiral—too heavy to defy gravity, but too light to reach the ground in a dead drop. The frenetic movement jarred his vision, pulling the vertigo back out of his skull through his nose like a large Egyptian hook. He closed his eyes at the sharp spark of pain.

No, flying wasn’t this. He’d beaten the thready worm of panic. He’d practiced. He closed his mouth and pulled a breath through his nose. He relaxed, trusting himself to the wind. When he opened his eyes, he leveled out. He spotted the blue roof again and tipped his wings towards it. The wind carried him forward, and he landed on shaky knees and the Owl’s roof. The vigilante watched him with his perpetual wide eyes.

“I was hoping I’d see you again,” he said gruffly. “I wanted to apologize.”

Adrien caught his breath. His head was still up in the clouds. He tucked his winged cape to his sides and let his feathers shield him from the cutting wind. “You attacked me.”

“Can you honestly blame me, dear boy?” Owl puffed up like an agitated cat. “It has become quite difficult, it seems, to tell friend from foe.”

“Not really,” Adrien argued. “Akumas are villains and hurt people. I’m not an akuma.”

“Ah, but neither is Hawkmoth.”

Adrien’s hands tensed at his sides. “How do you know?”

“You’ve got yourself into a right pickle with Ladybug and Volpina. It was rather rash of them to judge the bird by his feathers. But they seem to think they are the sole arbiters of who is _allowed_ to operate in this city.” His voice, as he spoke, grew steadily more indignant. He seemed to finally hear the tone his voice had picked up, and a frown slipped onto his face.

Adrien felt a droplet of water land on the bridge of his mask and glide down the beak. Two more landed on his bare neck, and he shivered. He had assumed that the Owl was another superhero like him and Ladybug, the result of a Miraculous granting magical power. The Owl had obvious superpowers—flight and certainly a durability that prevented a man of his age from breaking his bones after that long mid-air crash—and he fit the animal theme.

But Adrien had checked again, and there was no owl in the Miraculous book. It was possible that there were Miraculouses who didn’t get the honor of an illustration, but Adrien doubted it. That left some worrying conclusions scrabbling in his mind. The Owl took a step towards him, and Adrien had to hold down the urge to flinch away. He pulled out his phone and asked, “Selfie?”

Owl blinked slowly. “...self what?”

“It’s a picture. Would you take one with me?”

He looked at Adrien as if he were speaking gibberish, but acquiesced. Adrien slid over to him and tucked himself under Owl’s wing, stretching out his hand to take the picture with a wide smile. As soon as the camera flashed, Adrien took a few steps away. His costume was half as vibrant in the picture and the Owl looked dazed, but it was good enough. He promptly posted it onto his newly created Instagram handle, @TheRealPaonBleu, and made sure to tag the _Ladyblog_. When it was sent, he gave the Owl one of his refined model smiles.

The Owl gave him a long look in return, and Adrien did his best not to flinch under those wide, unblinking eyes. More raindrops fell from the sky, pattering the roof and leaving dark water spots on the concrete.

“So, tell me, Owl,” said Adrien, putting an emphasis on the vigilante’s moniker. He leaned forward, letting his taller height become a loom. It wasn’t often he had the height advantage on an adult. “How did you get your powers?”

“From a Miraculous, of course.”

Adrien faltered. He reminded himself that the words ‘Miraculous’ and ‘kwami’ were not common knowledge. He doubted even Alya knew about the true source of their superpowers, despite being the second-hand well of knowledge of all things Ladybug.

“But I think the better question is where you received _your_ powers?” the Owl continued.

“From a Miracu-”

“Yes, of course. But if you are wielding the power of the peacock, you must have come across your Miraculous somehow. Its, ah, former owner was not an individual known for sharing.”

A roll of thunder crashed overhead and Adrien’s heartbeat matched it, beating a thready rabbit pulse that wanted to crawl free of his skin and escape. “You knew the former peacock?”

The Owl smiled as if a fishhook pulled up the corners of his mouth. A flash of lightning arced across the sky behind him, casting him in silhouette like Batman on the cover of a comic book. “Yes,” he said simply, as if acknowledging he knew which colors made purple and not the identity of Adrien’s superhero predecessor (who may have been his own departed mother).

Thunder roared distantly, succeeded by another lightning flash. Then another. The rain began its downpour in earnest. A pitter patter of raindrops bounced off Adrien’s mask. More poured down his feathers, some sliding free and others burrowing deeper towards his skin. He flapped his wings once, hard, shaking the droplets free.

“I don’t understand. If you know all that, why did you attack me?” he asked accusingly. “Why did you tell Ladybug and Volpina that I was an akuma?” He would have known it was a lie.

They stood at length while the rain turned their costumes dark and heavy with water, and Adrien almost asked again, before Owl answered. “Because I wanted to stop you from making a mistake that could cost you your life. And because I haven’t yet figured out where your loyalties lie.”

“A mistake?” Adrien demanded.

“You’re just a child,” the Owl said gently. He splashed across the shallow puddles that had gathered on the roof and stopped a bare foot from Adrien, placing a hand on his shoulder. Adrien shrugged off the contact, but the Owl seemed nonplussed. “I admire your courage,” he continued. “Honestly. But this is the kind of undertaking that could get you killed. I understand how many others have suffered under the thumb of their Miraculous. Children, like you.” This close, Adrien could see past the mask and find genuine hurt in his eyes. “I won’t let that happen.”

“And what about Ladybug and Volpina?” he asked hotly. He was starting to feel a pull on him, a familiar gravity that he couldn’t ignore any more than the laws of physics could. “Why do they get to keep their Miraculous?”

“I was hoping they’d stop you for me,” he admitted. “And they did. You’ll never fly in Paris again. Not with them watching.”

Adrien gasped an indrawn breath and held it as if he were shoved into a deep body of water. He took a half step back, shivering as a gust of wind made him feel chill beneath his damp wings. He couldn’t fly, not with his feathers wet. But neither could the Owl.

He scanned the roof, searching for an exit. He hoped his suspicions were right, or else he was a chicken loitering in the fox’s den. There, a few paces away, was a spot of concrete that was lighter than the rest, seemingly untouched by rain. He left out the breath he had been holding and turned back to the Owl. “They won’t appreciate being manipulated like that,” he said with certainty, loudly enough to carry his voice above the intermittent thunder.

Owl’s bright eyes rolled. “I assure you, they already are and not by me. I don’t pretend to know what Hawkmoth’s plans are, but as I understand it, if those girls had given him their Miraculous none of us would have been caught in the crossfire.”

“But you wouldn’t have your powers either,” Adrien guessed. “Admit it, there is no owl Miraculous.”

The Owl deflated like a large balloon. “What does it matter? I’m helping people, paying kindness forward. Isn’t that all a hero is? All a hero needs to be?” He wrapped his arms across his chest and shivered. A couple of his feathers broke free and drifted the roof, making tiny ripples in the puddle at his feet. “Since I was a boy, I always dreamed of being a superhero.”

“So did I.”

“I’m sorry,” said Owl, and Adrien bristled at the sincerity and condescension wedded in his voice. The Owl’s hand slid to his waist, resting on the silver handle of his grappling hook. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I’d sooner take your Miraculous now than see the day where a less principled akuma killed you for it.”

“Or Hawkmoth could give us his,” said Volpina.

The Owl jerked towards her voice, seemingly coming from nowhere. Adrien smiled. “Took you long enough,” he said. He’d posted the selfie of him and the Owl what felt like half an hour ago.

“Had to figure out what your game was, bluebird.” With a flash of orange light, Volpina materialized onto the rooftop, illusion fizzling out like an old bulb. Her fur was rain-slicked to a dark russet. “We’ve walked into too many traps to get my tail caught again.” She smiled back at him, but when she turned to the Owl, her grin turned menacing. She began to clap sarcastically. “Well played, Hedwig. Ladybug thought you were on our side, but I know a liar when I see one.”

“Volpina, let’s be reasonable,” said Owl. “I’ve seen you with Ladybug. You wouldn’t share her partnership by choice.”

“Oh, do you think you know what I want now?” Volpina demanded. Her eyes flashed in the dark. “How cute. But Ladybug and I are wise to your charade now.” She touched her ear, her human ear, where a small, black earbud was nestled. “You hear all that, Bugs?”

Lightning blinded them all for a moment, and in the next Ladybug landed onto the roof, ducking and rolling and smoothly surging to her feet. A wake of water splashed up behind her. She shifted to the left, keeping the Owl between herself and Volpina. Adrien counted himself lucky that it wasn’t him against them this time.

“Why would you lie us, Damocles?” Ladybug demanded. She said the word ‘lie’ like a four-letter word, her voice dripping with betrayal. “We trusted you.”

“I suppose that was meant to be the point,” said the Owl, Damocles. “But I won’t apologize for trying to get you children out of the situation you’ve all been put in.”

Ladybug tilted her head and stared into the middle distance, as if listening to a faraway sound only she could hear. Her back straightened and she looked at Damocles. “Yes, but someone else benefits from us giving up, doesn’t he?” She let the sentence hang with implication. There could be no mistaking who she meant.

Some unspoken signal passed between Ladybug and Volpina, the latter creeping up behind Damocles while Ladybug held his attention. Adrien held still as statue, eager to help but loathe to interfere with an unknown plan.  
“I don’t appreciate your implication, young lady,” said Damocles.

Ladybug shrugged. “You don’t have to appreciate it for it to be true.” She stepped closer to Damocles, putting her hands up as if to say, ‘see? I don’t have any weapons.’ Nevermind that her fists alone were weapons to respect. For all she wore a mask, her face was an open book turned to page of de-escalation. She said, “I believe you honestly want to help. But your partner, the one who gave you your powers? He doesn’t have anyone’s best interests at heart but his own. I’m sorry.”

Damocles’ face pinched in confusion. “What the devil are you talking ab-”

Volpina sweeped her flute at Damocles’ feet. He stumbled, and might have recovered balance if he hadn’t slipped in the puddle of water pooling at his feet. He went down almost in slow motion. Adrien winched as he hit the ground, water rippling from him in concentric circles.

He twitched to act, but halted at Ladybug’s quelling look. She didn’t waste time, crouching above the Owl and pulling at his utility belt. Damocles jolted, rising with a protest, but his neck pushed against the bar of Volpina’s flute as she wrapped her arms around his torso. Ladybug dumped the contents of the belt onto the wet roof—the grappling hook fell with a clatter-splash, followed by two boomerangs, a spray can, and a small radio, which cracked onto the hard concrete, fizzling as soon as it touched water.

Adrien watched in confused fascination as a small white butterfly crawled from the cracked open device as if it were its cocoon. It fluttered upwards until a stray raindrop hit it like a bullet, and it fell back to ground. It landed in a puddle, struggling desperately, wings and little legs scrabbling for life. Adrien looked away.

When he turned back, Ladybug was crouched above the puddle with the broken butterfly in her hands. Her expression, an open book before, slammed shut. Volpina had helped the elder Mr. Damocles to his feet. His costume had disappeared, leaving his brown tweed suit wetter and wetter as he stood with them on the rooftop. They all looked at the dead white butterfly with different degrees of confusion.

“I don’t understand,” said Adrien. “I thought akumas were supposed to be black.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Out of the sirens  
> Might come the birdsong  
> Out of the silence  
> Might come the love song  
> After the love song  
> Might come the sunrise  
> After the sunrise  
> Might come the silence”  
> (Birdsong, Regina Spectator)


	7. Breaking the Markov Chain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marinette is getting into the routine of being a superhero, and with her allies—and a lack of akuma corruption—she thrives. That is until former akuma victims start crawling out from the woodwork, making Marinette realize she may be able to forgive their actions but never forget their pain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (This chapter contains implicit references to sexual assault, gas-lighting, and depictions of police violence.)

The protests started on Tuesday. No Akuma Watch alerted her, and so Marinette found out about it after the fact. The fact was this—during the leaks, Doxxer had swept the skeletons from TVi Studio’s closet with a digital broom. The media company’s mass sexual misconduct reports were exposed, which they handled by firing the employees who filed the original charges—basically punishing victims and sweeping their problems under the rug. 

In response, employees of TVi staged a mass walkout and protest, spilling onto the street outside the studio, raising pickets and racket high. They demanded transparency and accountability. TVi’s responding silence was deafening. 

Working at the patisserie, Marinette had never had a boss besides her parents. But she hoped she could be as brave as these people were, risking their employment in solitary. Taking preemptive action for once, she hid among the crowd and watched, wary that heightened emotions would metamorphose into an akuma in the chaos. 

Marinette remembered Aurore, the young meteorologist who had been fired, and how she had retaliated with literal fire after she was akumatized. She, too, was there, though Marinette almost didn’t recognize her out of costume. She wore a turquoise sundress, despite the chill of autumn, and held aloft a bright yellow umbrella like a picket. #MeToo was painted red across it like fresh blood. 

She almost went up to Aurore, but what would she even say? She could apologize, though the series of incidents leading them here wasn’t her fault. She could sympathize, but not empathize. Marinette hadn’t absorbed Aurore’s akuma and, while she wasn’t disappointed to avoid her pain, it did mean there was a butterfly in her garden, crawling with all those emotions. And everything beneath, everything that led to the akuma’s conception, it must still be there, thrumming beneath the surface. 

After her hour of lunch break, she returned to school. Dark clouds preceded her, falling into raindrops as soon as she reached indoors. 

The next several days were a powder keg as the protests became more frequent. The police began showing up before the protesters, guarding the TVi building like a pack of half-starved guard dogs on a thin leash. Nevertheless, they persisted. Protesters stood their ground, the crowds growing in size and volume. Every day Marinette spent her lunch break there, and every day she left she felt like she was had left the stove on.

The following Saturday, the crowds were at their largest, and emotions bubbled to overflow—riot shields a wall, fists raised like flags, a disagreeable discourse set to chant—and Hawkmoth got his pawn.

None of the media-branded “rioters,” who by every right felt exploited, were turned. It was one Officer Roger Raincomprix. The butterfly slipped past his riot shield as no protester could, and in seconds his arsenal grew beyond resistance. Anger is a mask to fear, and Roger let it blind him. 

Tear gas flooded the streets like a fog, erupting thick and cloying into screams and overwhelming fumes. Marinette pushed herself through the fleeing crowd like a rabbit in a stampede, her heart in the red zone. She spotted Aurore’s flagging umbrella and kept her eyes—itching, burning, tearing—on it in the growing smokescreen. 

“Tikki,” she whispered. Her voice was lost in the cacophony. “Tikki!” she tried again, a shot in the dark. “Transform me!”

The transformation took over her in the concealment of the tear gas—the only advantage it gave her. When she was Ladybug, the acrid scent in the air was tolerable, if not pleasant, but she still couldn’t see through the gas. Red and blue police lights reflected off of it like smoke and mirrors. 

She reached the yellow umbrella and grasped Aurore’s arm. The girl yanked back, then relaxed. “L-ladybug?”

“Hello, Aurore. We’re going to get out of this.”

Aurore nodded. She held her umbrella close like a shield, the air around her thinner. Together they ran to the fringes of the dispersing crowd. The flash of red and blue grew closer, brighter. Something large and reflective moved through the din like a ghost. Marinette gasped, breathing in the chemicals. She coughed past the words of her lucky charm. She couldn’t afford to de-transform in the midst of the tear gas. 

“Run, go!” she yelled at Aurore. She let go and faced the whirring lights. Pulling out her yo-yo, Marinette spun a fan too fast to track its movement. Slowly, the tear gas blew towards the figure, the akuma she had been walking across pins and needles for. 

He was like a Transformer whose second life was a police car—a bulky blue suit of armor standing eight feet tall, capped by pauldrons flashing like emergency beacons, and face hidden behind a moth-shaped visor. 

“Ladybug, you are under arrest for disturbing the peace,” he said robotically. 

Marinette was deeply aware of the protesters around her, still fleeing from the gas and police and akuma, but she couldn’t face it all at once. She stood her ground against the akuma and shouted, “Well, then you’re going to have to catch me, because I’m resisting arrest!”

The akuma raised both of his fists as if they were rocket launchers. She wouldn't be surprised if they were. She took a few steps back and tapped at her earring.  _ Riiing… Riiing... Riiing… _

THOOM. Marinette ducked at projectiles fired from his hands. She swore. “Come on, come on.” She flipped and wrapped her yo-yo around one of his arms and pulled. Pound for pound, he was larger, but she was stronger. His arm bent like an action figure at the elbow. One of the projectiles fired wide, the other hooked her hand, forcing her grip open and her yo-yo to clatter to the ground. 

“Hello?” Her earrings buzzed. 

“Alya!” Marinette shrieked. “Akuma, TVi. Call Volpina.” She twisted to the ground, grabbing her yo-yo with her free hand, and twisting behind the akuma. Stepping too far away made her vulnerable to his bindings. She ducked and slunk around him as he pounded the air with his microwave-sized fists. 

“Right. Got it,” said Alya. They’d drafted a battle plan over the last few months. The Ladyblog was no longer just a news site, but a tool of communication between Alya, Paris, and Ladybug. All she had to do was message Volpina’s account, and Volpina would know where she was needed. “Oh my god, I just turned on the news. Are you okay?”

Marinette grunted her reply as a fist glanced off her shoulder. The blow sent her stumbling backward and heaving polluted air into her lungs. It felt like being hit by a car. “I’m,” another fit of coughs, “fine.”

Another pair of glowing handcuffs shot at her. She sprung back and they ricocheted off the ground. The akuma loomed in the gas. “Ladybug, you are under arrest for vigilantism,” he said like a speak-and-spell possessed. “You are  _ not _ above the law.”

Then a brick hit him in the arm. 

It bounced off with a heavy thud, leaving an apple-sized dent behind. Marinette and the akuma turned to the source, and there was dainty Aurore Beauréal with her umbrella in one hand and milk streaming from her eyes like tears. There were more civilians  behind her, discarding empty cartons and grabbing every rock and brick they could scavenge. 

“Assault of a police officer,” droned the akuma. “You are all under arrest.”

As if Aurore’s brick was the first drop of rain, the protesters roared like thunder and stormed the akuma with their improvised weapons. They hit the akuma with a  _ clunk _ ,  _ thunk _ , and  _ crash _ , smashing divots and dents into the armor. One rock hit the akuma’s visor like a shot, fracturing a spider web of cracks. 

The akuma raised his hands towards the crowd, and Marinette shouted, “No!” She leaped atop him, wrapping her yo-yo around his armored neck like a garrotte and clinging on as he was hit by barrage after barrage of debris. More glowing handcuffs shot from his hands, arresting the brick-throwers. 

The akuma blew the whistle around his neck, and the cuffed protesters turned on their allies. Then, he lifted his arms up and pulled at the string around him. Marinette clung one-handed, feet kicking and glancing off the smooth metal of his back. “Come on, Volpina,” she wheezed. 

Another throng of shouting voices rose from the mists of gas behind her. The akuma turned abruptly, nearly dislodging Marinette from his back. A brick sailed at Marinette and she braced herself for impact. The brick hit her and extinguished like a flame. A mirage. 

The second crowd was a mirage armed with illusionary bricks and laughably poor aim. The akuma seemed to not notice how their projectiles disappeared as soon as they hit solid ground. Marinette gritted her teeth and climbed one-handed up the suit of armor. She had roughly five minutes before Volpina’s mirage would dissipate. 

She spoke through the burn in her throat. “Lucky charm.”

Luck pumped through her like blood through arteries. The power clogged up at her arm where the vise of the handcuffs bit into her skin. It was numb up to the elbow now. She twisted her wrist and hissed as skin wrenched against metal.

Jostled by the akuma’s sharp movements, she threaded her arm like a needle through the coils of yo-yo. She hung like a spider trapped in its own web. When the akuma stomped towards Volpina’s rabble rousers, Marinette went limp into the strings as if they were a hammock tied to a tree and not a thundering mech. 

A projectile whizzed towards her head and Marinette snatched it from the air. 

She laughed in disbelief. It was a crowbar. Lucky charm indeed. 

Using the curved end of the crowbar, she prised it between her wrist and the cuff, levering the metal free with a satisfying  _ crack _ as her luck burst with the force of a geyser unstoppered. 

The akuma bowled through the crowd, tearing them to a phantasmagoria of last impressions, the crystallization of wrath shattered into sense memory. 

Marinette slid loose of her bindings, hitting the indifferent concrete with a shock. She pulled. Muscles tensing, both hands gripping at the tensile lattice, she toppled the akuma to the ground. He fell like a statue that had outlived its context. Armor buckled like the aftermath of a car crash, leaving metal warped and bystanders staring in macabre fascination.

Before the police officer could stand, Marinette unhooked the whistle from around his neck and crushed it to bits and pieces in her fist. She squeezed harder, and the akuma crumpled as a flower. She let it fall into the compartment of her yo-yo, where it stayed. 

When the dust settled, she could see Volpina with a self-satisfied grin. Dirt speckled her orange fur like the quail eggs her mother cracked open to crown her steak tartare. Her eyes reflected the afternoon lights, glowing as a dog’s in a photograph. At the moment of the flash, an expression of anger caught in the emulsion. 

Marinette blinked stupidly. Volpina had been sulky for weeks now. Every “Are you okay?” was met with a brusque “fine.” Marinette often overlooked details for the bigger picture, but even she knew that “fine” was a shield protecting tender feelings. Marinette’s subsequent prodding was met with silence, silence like a bowstring, stretched tight and ready to snap. 

She sent a tentative smile to Volpina across the seeming gulf between them. The cheering, chanting crowd was a dull roar around her. Whistles punctuated the din, but were barely heard above the rabble. The officer down groaned, and her eyes flicked to him. She offered him a hand up, glad to be clean of whatever foul mood had caused his transformation. 

He accepted the hand, eyes widening as she hauled him to his feet. Her smile turned to gritted teeth. Bruises seeded deep into her arms and legs. By tomorrow morning they would bloom black and blue.

He straightened the navy blue cap on his head and gave her a nod. A white patch sewn onto his jacket said his name was Raincomprix. “Thank you,” he said, voice deep but barely heard above the crowd. “Ladybug.”

“Don’t thank me. Thank the protestors. They saved you as much as me.”

He nodded again, as a bobblehead. His adam’s apple wobbled in his throat. Without another word, he slipped into the crowd, drowning body and voice into a single drop in the sea of unrest. 

Marinette had always thought of police as superheroes, figures of authority who stopped bad guys and protected victims. She could have rested the full blame on Officer Raincomprix—who the media were calling “Rogercop,” (which later prompted Alya into a rant about the lack of journalistic creativity). But the conflict hadn’t started there. Marinette fought the akuma. She knew his capabilities up close and personal. 

The tear gas hadn’t come from Roger. 

“Hey, Blue!” Volpina’s voice echoed off the high walls of the gymnasium. 

Adrien turned to find her silhouette in the doorway. Her shadow cast a mighty superhero pose across the polished wood floor. When the doors closed behind her, the gym was thrown into an evening gloom—late sun and early moonlight crawling through the skylights underlined by the bright red letters of an EXIT sign. 

“What are we, vampires?” she teased. Her footsteps barely made a sound in the big, empty room. 

“If we turned on the lights, someone would know we’re here.”

He could just barely see her smirk in the dark. She stepped into the reach of the evening sunlight. Its fingers painted her orange and white coat shades of blue and nearly obscured a centime-sized bruise on her cheek. “I say let them know,” she countered. “What are they going to do—kick us out?” She laughed. “We’re Paris’ superheroes.”

“ _ You _ are,” he muttered.

Her long fox ears twitched, and his face warmed. He forgot her ears rivaled his eyes under the masks. 

“We’ll get your there, Blue.” She had begun prowling a loose fibonacci around him, spiraling closer with every revolution. Adrien wished he had the flight of a peacock. Then he could fly above whatever trick she was playing. 

He got the feeling the sparring match had already started. Every word spoken to Volpina was like tossing a ping pong ball. You expected it batted back with twice the force you served it.

Without warning, her lazy circle turned into a connect-the-dots, and he was the foci. “Covert fea-”

Her kick knocked the wind from his lungs, silencing his power move. He flinched backward, barely feeling the ache before she ducked low, sweeping his legs out from under him. He tucked his arms like a mummy, letting his wings cushion the fall. It left his hands useless, his back exposed. 

He felt Volpina’s claws touch his spine like an acupuncturist searching for the right chakra before she let needle puncture skin. 

“The akuma just killed you.”

He found a sigh in his breathlessness. The pressure of her claws left and he tentatively rolled over. He shivered at her eyes alight in the dark and the pearly white points of her teeth. “Do you bite?” he blurted.

She blinked down at him. A shiver of silence divided them.

“My bite is worse than my bark,” she said finally. “But you don’t need to bite when your bark’s persuasive enough.”

She helped him to his feet. They seperated, coming to stand at opposite sides of the gymnasium at the respective three-point lines. The shadow of the basketball hoop surrounded him like an aureole. 

Volpina efficiently showed him his weaknesses. 

She kept disappearing into the shadows, making him wish he had let her flood the gymnasium in light. His eyes were sharp, but his pallet of colors blurred in the dark. Volpina wrapped the shadows around her like a cloak, hidden until she opened her bright eyes to strike. 

His wings made him slow. Several times he tripped over the trailing tail feathers at the suggestion of Volpina, fallen before she’d even surfaced. While he got back up, her laughter would echo off the high ceilings. 

A few falls made him conclude that elevation was also an issue. Without the advantage of height, his wings were useless. He needed a higher starting point to glide down. That realization had him sprinting to the bleachers at the start of each “round,” forcing Volpina to climb up the steps to meet him. Adrien dove and spun and tried to land hits on her with a borrowed baseball bat—a nonlethal substitute for his feather blade. It gave him enough of an edge to land a few hits. 

Of course, Volpina still had the advantage of experience. Her speed was deadly, but it was her cunning that truly made her dangerous. Adrien would block her claws, only to be thwarted by a leg sweep or unexpected knee to the stomach. 

She left him bruised and battered. He took small victory that he managed to land a few hits at all. While he was used to fencing dictated by rules, Volpina quickly taught him that real fights were lawless. He paid her advice back with a knock to the back of her knee that sent her falling. 

He flinched, expecting a hit back in retaliation. But she only laughed. “You’re starting to get it. Now, do it again.”

After an hour of sparring, Adrien’s face gleamed with sweat. His costume clung uncomfortably to his skin, hiding fresh, tender spots layering the previous bruises, which by now had faded almost completely. 

“Getting tired?” Volpina challenged. (He was beginning to suspect every one of her words was loaded with a challenge ready to be met).

“No.”

She smiled at him blandly. “Liar.”

Adrien grimaced, caught again. He sat on the bleachers with a soft  _ clank _ , taking a breather. His mouth was dry as deadwood. 

“An akuma would have killed you a hundred times with you fighting like that. You’re lucky the Owl was a white hat or you’d have been knocked flat by his arsenal.”

He hummed noncommittally in response. It was bad enough getting a lecture from an akuma, he didn’t need one from Volpina, too. That wasn’t what he’d asked for. His hands curled into loose fists in his lap.

Volpina stretched in the dusklight, back arched like a bow. She barely looked tired, and Adrien did his best not to give in to frustration. Volpina was doing him a favor—one Ladybug didn’t think was worth doing. 

“It’s nothing personal, Blue,” said Volpina, as if reading his thoughts. “Ladybug puts Paris first.”

“Last time I checked we lived here too.”

She chuckled. “But we’re superheroes.” she struck a pose as if to demonstrate, flexing a muscular arm. “We can take care of ourselves.”

His smile twisted wrly. He  _ could _ take care of himself. He had proved it. Okay, so maybe facing the Owl alone was a mistake. But he’d fixed it. With Ladybug and Volpina together, he’d succeeded. The victory seeded confidence in his chest, blooming into sunflowers of independence and small poppies of pride. Training with Volpina would be the water to keep the feeling alive.

He wanted to open up his heart and hand out bouquets, showing off how far he had come. Look, I did it, he would say, I’m a superhero. Maybe becoming a hero would finally make his father proud of him—force him to meet his eyes and notice Adrien. “Do your parents know that you’re a superhero?” he asked. 

“Of course they do,” she said primly. She fidgeted with the foxtail charm around her neck, swallowing it with her fist like a fish on a hook. “The fox Miraculous has been passed down through my family for generations. My grandmother gave it to me when I turned thirteen.”

“My father would probably ground me if he ever found out I was trying to be a superhero,” said Adrien glumly. There was jealousy growing again in his gut, stubborn and nasty as mold. 

“You’re not  _ trying _ anything,” said Volpina sharply. “You have the Miraculous, so you  _ are _ a superhero. And don’t you dare let anyone take that away.”

“But what if he finds—” 

“Lie,” she interrupted. “Lie if you have to. He never has to know about this side of you. It’s yours. Your choice.” The fur on the back of her bristled like rolling hills of orange gold wheat. 

Adrien’s fingers carded through his hair, brushing the cold metal of his mask. He thought of the same cold metal of the safe hidden behind a painting of his mother. Duusu had been there, locked away like the trigger of a bad memory. Surely by now his father knew what was missing. He could put two and two together and know that the peacock on tv used the same Miraculous. 

“Get up,” said Volpina, reaching out her hand. “Let’s go again.”

Alya was glad she brought a jacket. Sitting cross-legged on a Paris rooftop at night put her in the bullseye of a chill wind. Ladybug, in her skintight suit, seemed unaffected by the cold. The line of her collarbone danced beneath the costume as she rolled her shoulders. 

Alya wrenched her eyes away from the tease of bare neck and focused on her phone, her face suddenly warm. “I finally have a lead,” she said, “on the thing you asked me to look into.”

“Which one?”

Alya pulled it up and turned around the phone to show her the image—a bee in profile, crafted of gossamer and plated gold. 

Ladybug hummed in interest and scrolled through the advertisement.  _ Bee Comb Bidding: Beginning at 1,000€.  _ Hamfisted alliteration aside, the auction house had credibility. They’d twice been attended by curators of the Louvre to garner new museum exhibits.

“Do you know where it came from?”

Alya caught herself chewing her nails, and stuffed her idle hands into her coat pockets. “A private donor from America. The application was anonymous.”

Ladybug frowned. “What about the others? The turtle, the peacock, the black c-“

“The butterfly is one too, isn’t it?” Ladybug’s eyes widened, and Alya bit her lip and stared at the phone in Ladybug’s hands. It seemed obvious, in hindsight. Once Ladybug had told her about the others, the “Miraculouses,” it wasn’t difficult to sense a pattern. All were animals, and Alya didn’t need to experience an akuma firsthand to know that they were butterflies.

“Yes.” No hesitation anymore. Ladybug couldn’t take off her masks—superheroes never can—but she did trust Alya with this, something that only passed between them. It made Alya’s chest warmer than the cold air could diminish. 

Ladybug passed the phone back and ran fluttery fingers through her dusky bangs. In the light of the sleeping city, the black had phantom tints of blue. 

“I’m still looking for the others.”

Ladybug smiled tightly and when she placed her hands on Alya’s shoulders, Alya nearly jumped at the contact. “I know, Alya. Thank you.” She pulled away, and Alya felt lighter like she could run a race and win thanks to Lady Luck. “I couldn’t do this without you.”

“What about Volpina?” The words were out of her mouth before she could lock them away.

Ladybug sighed. “Volpina’s my partner, but,” she fiddled with her holstered yo-yo, “we don’t always see eye-to-eye.”

What could  _ that  _ mean? Alya noted the conversational landmine and quietly stepped around it. “So, why are you looking for these anyway?”

“Hawkmoth wants my Miraculous. If he’s looking for more of them, I want to find them first, keep them safe.” The look in her eyes was fierce, blue as sky, and determined, and Alya was pulled into their depths.

She cleared her throat, blinked the stardust from her eyes, then said, “So if you collect them all first, you win.”

Ladybug laughed, but it had bitter aftertaste to it, like cocoa and coffee. “With any luck,” she said and chuckled again.

She strode to the roof’s edge and rested her arms on the raised lip. After a moment, Alya joined her, looking out at the dark, twinkling expanse of Paris below and the pinprick of docile suburbs beyond. A comfortable silence unfurled between them.

Her eyes slid to Ladybug, then darted back to the cityscape. It was still outrageous, standing side by side with her hero—that Ladybug chose  _ her _ of all the people in Paris to help her. Alya was a genuine sidekick, and the idea summoned a smile to her lips.

At this closeness, she could see pieces of the person behind the mask, like jewels glittering beneath stone. Ladybug had freckles, barely visible on her bare nose. She pressed her hands to her cheeks when she was excited as if smothering happy noises. She played with her yo-yo, absently, even when she wasn’t fighting, walking the dog, rocking the baby. Alya didn’t think she even knew she was doing it half the time.

“Alya, can I ask you something?”

Alya blinked at the broken silence. It felt like a yawning crack in the air. She nodded, then realizing the dark, said, “Anything.”

Ladybug crossed her arms as if suddenly feeling the cold. She didn’t look at Alya. 

“When you were,” she faltered, “when you were akumatized, did you—what did you  _ feel _ ?” The last word brought a fresh chill to Alya ’s neck.

“I—” the bitter words slipped off her tongue and backward down her throat. She swallowed. 

It had almost felt like a dream. She was a vessel, spilling over with raw emotions taken to their furthest extreme, like a car with a depressed pedal and a broken steering wheel. That person who did those things wasn’t her. Or maybe that was just denial sinking its thorns of plausible deniability into her conscience.

“I felt like a puppet. Like all I was was my anger, my rage. I’ve never felt that strongly before about  _ anything _ .” Even from the safety of memory, her fists were clenched oyster-tight. 

Ladybug’s voice was fractured like a split wishbone. “I’m sorry.” 

“Sorry?” She said in disbelief. “Don’t give me that cliche garbage.”

Startled, Ladybug finally looked at her to meet her level stare.

Alya waved an indignant finger. “I’ve read enough comic books to know where this is going. You apologize for something that's not your fault until the guilt eats you up, and some lucky supervillain takes advantage of it. No.”

“No?”

“If someone hunts and kills a deer, whose fault is it?” Ladybug opened her mouth to answer, but Alya wasn’t finished with her point. “You obviously don’t blame the deer for being killed. And you can’t blame the gun, because it doesn’t choose its target. So who’s at fault?”

Her point was obvious, and Ladybug reached it with a dawning and reluctant answer. “The hunter.”

Alya smiled smugly. “Exactly. Every akuma is Hawkmoth’s fault because he creates them, he corrupts them, and  _ he _ makes them hurt people. He pulls the trigger.”

Ladybug suddenly peeled from the building’s edge and paced the flat concrete roof. She withdrew her yo-yo and strung it up and down. Alya could almost hear her thoughts spinning with it.

“We can’t remove the prey, or the hunter, or the forest. And every time I disarm him, Hawkmoth finds a new weapon. But what if,” she flashed Alya a pearlescent smile in the night, “what if we could add a new apex predator to the mix.” 

Alya found herself grinning back. “Become the wolf. The hunter becomes the hunted.” 

Ladybug laughed, and Alya’s cheeks grew warm. Her hero lifted clenched fists. Steel flashed behind her blue eyes. “We’ll find the rock that he’s hiding under. And bring the fight to Hawkmoth.”

Marinette left her parent’s bakery the next day with a basket of bread and pastries warm between the crook of her elbow. The escaping smells tickled her stomach as she walked down the street. She wore her pink boots over the Ladybug costume; a big orange leaf stuck to her heel. A black bomber jacket matched her spots and let her costume below the waist pass as regular tights. The mask was harder to hide, but enough girls her age cosplayed as Ladybug to not make it stand out too much. 

A street vendor she passed smelled of roasted chestnuts. It covered the distant barge scent of the River Seine like air freshener sprayed in a collège locker room. No one stopped her to ask for a photo or an autograph, and Marinette was glad for the anonymity. 

She stopped at the Hope Center, a homeless shelter just outside of her neighborhood, baked goods still warm in their dishtowel swaddling clothes. The desk manager was a grizzled woman with a pink buzz cut and a constellation of studs playing connect-the-dots from ear to nose to lip. Her default stern face softened abruptly. “Lady, good to see you again,” she said, as if surprised. She always sounded surprised when Marinette returned. 

“Hello, Gaelle. Is Xavier here?”

“You just caught him. He’s in the mess having dinner.”

Gaelle waived her through. The first time Marinette showed up here as Ladybug, she was met with a cold veneer of hostility, making her anxiety racquet up several pegs. Eventually, she realized that Gaelle and the other regulars weren’t opposed to Ladybug being here on principle, but worried she was there to take advantage of the good publicity. Or worse, to punish Xavier for becoming an akuma. 

It took several weeks of bread and pastry offerings and undercover volunteer hours after school to settle Gaelle’s hackles, and for Marinette’s vision of her as a snarling guard dog to shift to a protective pitbull whose bark was worse than her bite.

Marinette brought the bread basket in through the kitchen, passing it off to the cooks inside. She’d stayed and volunteered a few times before—it wasn’t much different from working at her parents’ patisserie—but today she had time only for Xavier. 

He was sitting at a table adjacent a long bench, cafeteria-style. A man and a woman were eating across from him, breaking bread and sharing conversation. When he saw her, his eyes lit up. “Lady! You’re early this week.”

Marinette smiled. There was a version of herself she was here that was different than either Marinette or Ladybug. The regulars of the Hope Center had taken to calling her “Lady” and the name had stuck like peanut butter on the roof of your mouth.

She snaked around full, bustling tables to sit next to Xavier. He was much healthier than the first time she’d seen him. His blush of bruises had faded. Where before he had been thin as street cat, now he looked weighty enough to endure a stiff breeze. But most of all, he smiled. It had been months of visiting before she’d ever seen him smile—all cigarette yellow teeth and hope.

He had crawled by his fingernails from rock bottom—with time and energy and help that would have left any person exhausted. She  _ knew _ what his fear was, had caged it in her heart like a canary starved for light. Sometimes, she felt a twinge of uglier emotions beneath her skin and wondered if they came from her or from the akumas. (She wasn’t sure which she feared more). 

Marinette felt a kind of responsibility towards him ever since that night on the roof, and a marrow-deep empathy she wished she’d never experienced.

“You hungry, Lady?” asked his companion, grinning behind an anaconda wrap of scarves. 

She shook her head. “I can’t stay today, Bruno. I just have a few questions for Xavier.” She looked sidelong at him and gentled her voice. “If you’re willing, that is.”

He paused, mid-bite into a bare bones sandwich. While he chewed, he gestured for her to sit. Marinette slid in beside him. His buddies eyed her surreptitiously. She could rarely read how the patrons of Hope Center felt towards her. She wasn’t an authority figure—people who had let them down again and again—but she wasn’t exactly their peer either. That left her in a nebulous third category. 

She tapped at the table with her nails absently. She had been hoping to get him alone. The kind of difficult details she wished to discuss might not be safe from listening ears. She raked her brain for a tact to start the conversation. 

Swallowing, Xavier said, “Ask away, Lady.”

She bit her lip. “Monsieur Xavier, it’s about your, ah, incident with the park rangers.”

His fingers made indents in the bread of his sandwich. He wouldn’t look at her, just picked at the soft crust and squished the slices of lunch meat and plasticky cheese inside. “Oh,” he said quietly. 

“If you don’t want to talk about it,” she hastily reassured. “That’s fine.”

“No,” he snapped. “I mean, yes, I. That’s fine.” 

The rest of the table was silent. Marinette continued, “When it happened, where were you?”

“The Trocadéro.”

“And where did the akuma come from?”

His brow furrowed. “I don’t.” He swallowed. “I don’t remember. Sorry.”

“That’s alright,” she said hastily. She shifted on the bench, and gave Xavier’s tablemates a tight smile. A scowl had risen over Bruno’s face; he’d picked up what they weren’t saying. The woman—what was her name?—Cheryl or Charlotte maybe—continued eating, either oblivious or deliberately disinterested. 

Xavier set down his half-mangled sandwich and finally looked at her. “I wish I could be more help.”

Marinette smiled back. Her insides felt soft and vulnerable. “You have helped,” she promised. At least she hoped that he was, that this would lead to  _ something _ . No matter what they did, Hawkmoth was always one step ahead. She needed to change the rules, change the game. 

She hesitated, then explained, “My partner and I, we’re looking for,” she lowered her voice, “ _ Hawkmoth _ . And knowing who and where his akumas target might be important.” 

“At least someone is,” growled Bruno in his gravely brogue. “Until some rich fuck gets turned, police don’t care.”

“Bruu-no!” the woman hissed. “Language.”

He waved a hand as if swatting a fly. “Sorry, Lady.” 

“I’ve heard worse,” she said with bluster. She tried not to think about the implications. She wasn’t naive—okay, she wasn’t  _ that  _ naive. She knew the police weren’t always the heroes like on the television. The protests earlier that week had proved that. But was it so wrong to hold onto the ideal of heroes? 

Xavier as Pigeonman hadn’t killed anyone, hadn’t done any permanent damage. But what if he had? Would he be wasting away in jail right now, instead of getting the help he needed? Marinette pushed the thought deep down in the cold, dark corner of her heart where her akumas fluttered restlessly. 

She stood up, stepping outside the bench. “Stay safe, everyone.”

“You too, Lady,” said Xavier. 

“I’ll do my best,” she said; it’s an answer to his request as much as is a promise.

Roger Raincomprix was out on two weeks paid leave, ideally leaving his desk free and clear. Paon Bleu and his selective ignorance of walls might have come in handy on this mission, if either she or Alya had managed to track him down. Instead, Marinette resigned herself to exploiting her reputation as a superhero to get the information they needed.

She walked through the front door of the police station brazen as a cat on the kitchen table. The woman at the front desk looked up from her boxy computer monitor and offered a faux-cheery smile. “How can I help you, mademoiselle?”

Marinette smiled back even as her gut gave a lurch. Right now she was Ladybug, and Ladybug ate social anxiety for breakfast. “I need to speak to whoever’s on the akuma case.”

The receptionist frowned. She had a mole on her upper lip. “That’s not for public record. The identities of victims are held in confidence.”

Marinette pushed down the resurfacing desire to flee this conversation. “Please, madame. I need to find Hawkmoth, and this is the best way I know how.”

The receptionist rolled a ballpoint pen between her forefinger and ring finger. It said, “Fluctuat nec mergitur” in comic sans font. Her frown hadn’t budged an inch. “If I gave confidential police information to any mademoiselle wearing a Ladybug onesie, I would be out of a job.” 

“But I  _ am _ Ladybug,” Marinette protested. 

“Sure you are, sweetie.”

Marinette fumed, words clawing at the sides of her mouth itching to get out. She let out a huff. This woman was only doing her job. Ladybug couldn’t demand whatever she wanted just because she was a superhero. That’s the kind of behavior she would expect from Chloe if (god forbid) the spoiled heiress ever got her paws on a Miraculous. 

Then, she remembered the name the akumatized police officer wore. She avoided most of the former akuma victims, but maybe with going through the ordeal he had she could impress upon him the seriousness of the situation.

“May I speak to Officer Raincomprix, please?” 

The receptionist bit at the cap of the pen. She had a line of perfectly straight teeth. After a long consideration, she said, “I’ll tell him you’re here.” She clacked away at the old, boxy computer, then rung a number on the black phone at her elbow.

There was a pause. Then, “Hello, Lieutenant Raincomprix. There’s a young mademoiselle here claiming to be Ladybug. She says she’s here to see you.” 

A tiny voice answered from the receiver. Marinette shuffled in place. Being called a liar sat in her stomach like a hot stone, making her stomach fluids bubble in indignation. Her arms didn’t know what to do, folding together defensively, then, realizing how that might come across, connecting behind her in a stiff parade rest, and finally coming to rest straight and limp at her sides. 

The receptionist hung up the phone. “He’ll see you now.”

Lieutenant Raincomprix was a short man, made even shorter by the slouching position he took at his desk. He ran a blistered hand through his ginger hair, then offered it to her to shake. 

After they introduced themselves to each other without the distraction of a riot (he insisted she called him “Roger”), Marinette sat, staring at him as he did the same to her. He had dark circles under his eyes. He scrutinized Marinette as if she were a suspect in a case. Then, his eyes grew soft and he whistled high to low. “Damn, you’re not past my daughter’s age.”

Marinette sat up straighter in the chair. The metal creaked threateningly. “I don’t see any adult superheroes helping out.”

A blush crawled across his cheeks, ugly splotches against his pale skin. “I’m sorry. If I had been doing my job, none of this would have happened.”

A frog leapt in her throat. It sounded suspiciously like Alya. “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing.” She watched Roger pick at the edge of a bandaid on his wrist. He wore them like bracelets stuck helter-skelter across both arms. “Please, Lieutenant,” she said. “Roger. We’re trying to track the patterns of the akumas.”

Roger stop fidgeting and let his hands fall in his lap. He raised a ginger eyebrow. “What do you need me to do?”

“I need to know the identities of all the akuma victims.”

She gave him credit—he waited for her to finish her request before voicing his disagreement. “Ladybug. We don’t keep those names because they’re under investigation. They’re witnesses. Confidential. It’s to protect them,” he said at last. The words sounded like a fax machine spitting out a policy form. 

“I’ll protect them,” she promised. They were Parisians just as anyone, and she had given her word that she would defend Paris from Hawkmoth. 

He let out a long breath, like steam expelling from a kettle spout. She could smell fish on his breath from across his desk. 

They needed this. Without Roger’s help, she doubted the police would give her the time of day, especially after the “incident” with the “rioters.” The media had not been kind to Ladybug then, saying she was “interfering with politics she doesn’t understand.” Clearly the media preferred their superheroes to be above politics. But she had saved Roger. He knew the fear an akuma could cause, could feel. He knew it would happen again and again if they didn’t stand up and stop it. 

“Lucky charm,” she whispered. Something that wasn’t luck twisted in her guts. Tikki would call this an abuse of her power. Marinette preferred to call it evening the odds.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay?”

He shook his head. “Yeah, I’ll help you. But you have to promise that this stays between you and me.” He met her eyes before glancing away, shuffling some papers uselessly at his desk. “If someone knew I was giving a civilian—even Ladybug,  _ especially  _ Ladybug—police information, I’d be in a heap of trouble.” 

Marinette bit her lip. She found the idea of lying to the police sat as well as a thumbtack on a chair. But she nodded. “No one will know but me.” 

This was also a lie. But she feared explaining how Alya fit into the dynamic would topple the careful trust she’d built with Roger like air against a tower of cards. Better to close the window and not let any stray breezes enter or else she’d be forced to play 52 pickup. 

A five-minute countdown clock ticked in Marinette’s mind. It was past time to leave. 

Roger fetched the folder, a plain manilla envelope, and set it on his desk between them—among a twisted up Newton’s cradle and a framed photograph of a young girl with his red hair. He tapped the envelope with two fingers. “Don’t lose it, because I’m not giving you another one.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And if someone else did get their hands on it, you didn’t get it from me. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

She waited for him to hand to her. She strangled the thick envelope nervously between her hands, then stopped, and straightened the creases. “Thank you,” she said sincerely. It took all her effort not to open the folder right there in the police station. She left with it tucked under her arm, feeling the weight of the receptionist's eyes follow her out. 

When Ladybug said she was coming over, the first thought in Alya’s mind was,  _ oh no, what if she sees my Ladybug board _ . The second thought was  _ oh no, my crush is coming  _ here. Those two thoughts floated around her head like fish in a too-small bowl, occasionally knocking against each other and diverting their path. 

She resolved to retire her pseudo conspiracy board—an investigation into Ladybug’s secret identity, created before the superhero had taken Alya into her confidence. She had crafted a judicious theory that Ladybug went to the same school as her. But perhaps some secrets could be driven past and not examined like roadkill.

She tore down her theories and lists and logs of Ladybug’s public appearances. Alya scowled at the corkboard as if it were a mirror. It seemed now, in foggy and faulty hindsight, more the shrine of a stalker than a fan. It didn’t matter that Ladybug was a public figure, a superhero; she deserved her privacy, too. 

But she still couldn’t bear to throw her journalistic work out. With a sigh, Alya shuffled the papers hodgepodge into a folder and shoved it beneath her mattress. She smiled. No one would look there, not even certain sticky-fingered younger sisters. That left the corkboard empty, to be filled by a new investigation. 

Her head crackled with excitement, lighting a fire under her feet. She tore into a cleaning frenzy, throwing crumpled papers and soda cans into the bin and making a lazy effort at making her bed. Ladybug had been in her bedroom before, but she hadn’t been expecting her before. This time was different. She wanted to—to what,  _ impress _ her?

Yes, she admitted. That was exactly what she wanted. That, and a burning need to know who Hawkmoth was. Alya dropped onto her desk chair and swiveled absently. 

When Ladybug tapped at her window half an hour later, her room had the veneer of tidiness (if you didn’t look in her closet or under her bed). Ladybug slapped a yellow manilla folder down onto Alya’s cleared desk. She smiled, but Alya no longer saw it as an easy smile. It was hard fought beneath the stress and viscera a real superhero braved. Alya squeezed her hand briefly, feeling the warmth beneath Ladybug’s glove. Ladybug squeezed back.

They spread out a map of Paris across the blank cork board. Each place an akuma was birthed, they pinned their name—their supervillain alias; Ladybug was almost pathological in not using the victims’ real names.

Alya connected the origin of each akuma to their target. Sometimes, this was immediate and obvious (Pigeonman kidnapping park rangers). In other cases, the motives were less clear (why  _ did _ Stoneheart go on a rampage?). 

A bright string linked herself and Aurore Beauréal inextricably to Tvi Studio. That was where Stormy Weather made her reign of elemental terror. The studio was also victim to Doxxer’s digital larceny. It could have been a coincidence, but Alya was not a girl who easily believed in coincidences. Major Bourgeois’s reelection campaign had taken a hit in the polls after the latter attack, and TVi’s stock plummeted both times.  

“Three from this school here,” said Ladybug, tapping a gloved finger to Collège Françoise Dupont.

“That’s my school,” said Alya quietly. She mulled over the implications. Hawkmoth seemingly had no pattern. But did he really?—that was what they were investigating. The three akumas at Françoise Dupont included herself, “Stoneheart”, and “The Owl” who must have been a teacher considering he was clearly an adult. Not to mention the anomaly that was his white akuma. She put a white pin in it.

Ladybug was wrapping the red string around her fingers absently, tugging it from the yarn ball in Alya’s hand. Alya unrolled the ball, giving her enough string to hang Hawkmoth with. 

“Is he looking for you?” Alya asked. 

A startled look lightninged across Ladybug’s face.

“Because if I were a supervillain,” Alya continued, “I would do exactly what we’re doing now. I’d find everything I could about my enemy and use it to my advantage.”

“Given supervillainy some thought, have you?” Ladybug teased, but there was pride in her voice, stroking Alya’s ego like a cat. 

She couldn’t help but smirk. “I’m a retired supervillain.” Joking about it felt safe with Ladybug. She knew Ladybug would never use her akuma against her.

Ladybug snorted. She turned back to the board and thrust her hand down, spinning a phantom yo-yo and sending her handful of yarn spilling down like streamers. She hooked the loose threads to the board, connecting akuma to location, cause to effect. “He must have some other plan,” Ladybug said pensively. “If he were only trying to draw out me, he wouldn’t waste time targeting adults.”

Alya caught the end of the string and spooled it towards herself. Ladybug felt the tension in the yarn and let herself be reeled in like a fish. When there was inches of string between them, Ladybug took the string and pulled it around Alya’s wrists like she was tying up a prisoner, winding them together.

Alya took a deep, shivery breath and closed her hands around Ladybug’s wrists. 

“You should know,” she said, quietly, even though no one else was home to hear. “Hawkmoth won’t get away this time. I’ll...you’ll stop him.” She needed Ladybug to know how serious she was. “I’m in your corner.”

Ladybug stared as if dazed, color rising in her pale cheeks. She gently pried the string connecting them apart, freeing a wrist. “That means a lot, Alya,” she said, pulling her other hand loose. “But no more heroics. Please. Let Volpina and me take care of the fighting.” She took a step back, forcing eye contact. “I need you to be safe.”

Ladybug was staring into her eyes as if looking for really hard something behind Alya’s irises. Agreement, maybe, or gratitude. A smile. There was a line between a smile and tears, and Ladybug’s expression was on its razor-thin edge, tethering back and forth, a pull of gravity away from falling. 

Alya found herself caught in that stare like a rabbit in a snare because it wasn’t just sad—she could handle sad—it was hopeful and vulnerable and adoring. Alya didn’t think anyone had ever looked at her like that before. 

That’s what pushed her forward. Alya’s push met Ladybug’s pull halfway, hooking their hands together, and she pressed a kiss to Ladybug’s slightly open mouth. 

There was a breathless, heart-in-her-throat moment, and then Alya pulled away, watching Ladybug’s face and waiting for a reaction. She felt a blush spill across her cheeks. Holy shit. She just kissed  _ Ladybug _ .

The red yarn caught up in her hands again, keeping them loosely tethered. A smile dawned on Ladybug’s face. Before Alya could respond, Ladybug’s hands were buried in her hair, their lips pressed ardently together again. Alya closed her eyes and sunk into the feelings of her bare hands against Ladybug’s skintight suit, the pressure of lips against her lips. 

_ Marinette _ , she thought, almost said. It hit her like an electric shock, and Alya pulled herself away. She felt like her whole body was blushing. “Ladybug, I—” 

“That’s not my—” Ladybug took a long, waverly breath in, then let it out in a hiss like a tea kettle. “You don’t know me.” Alya’s face must have fallen because she hastily added, “I mean, we can’t… my identity. I—” 

“It’s fine,” Alya interrupted. “I understand.” And despite her hopes and wants, she did understand. A superhero had to keep their identity a secret, to protect their loved ones. She caught her fingers pressed lightly against her own lips and buried them in the pocket of her jacket. 

If there was a choice, she would rather be Oracle than Lois Lane, rather be the sidekick than the love interest. If she had a choice (she’d rather be both).

She looked at the board so she wouldn’t have to look at Ladybug’s face. 

Then, she blinked and looked again.

At a distance, the details coalesced like a picture mosaic. Bright suggestions of patterns shifted in her head like the colored tiles of a Rubik’s Cube twisting into a symmetrical three by three.

She leaned in close, details blurring at the fringes of her eyes. She tapped the board at her newfound epicenter. “These buildings here. The akumas are most concentrated here and more spread out the further away.” She followed the strings with her finger to demonstrate. 

Ladybug met her side, their elbows just barely brushing. “That’s assuming his power needs proximity.” 

Alya glanced at her. Ladybug’s face was mired with doubt, but there was a barely hidden hope shining past it. The feeling mirrored in Alya—recursive and shiny and threatening to burst out of her chest. 

“We should do more research,” said Alya, excitement running loose with her voice. “Find out what those buildings are and where Hawkmoth could be hiding nearby.”

She jumped onto her desk chair, sitting backwards as she clicked through google maps. She printed the target section of the map out. As she went through the database, every time she eliminated a building she crossed it off the paper. She cross-referenced every businesses’ hours of operation against active akumas. Soon the paper was a tic-tac-toe game of red and “x” was cheating. 

Until Alya hit a link that had her staring in dead disbelief at her screen. She dropped her mouse, sending it tumbling off the desk.

“What is it?” Ladybug crowded over, leaning into Alya and peering over her shoulder.

There was a residential building, an apartment complex surrounded on both sides by businesses. And above the penthouse suite was a modern “green” roof—a private butterfly garden sitting pretty in the target zone.

“Holy crap,” said Ladybug. “He wouldn’t just—”

Alya turned her head and found herself nose-to-nose with Ladybug. “Butterflies in supply, akumas in demand,” she said. “It’s worth a look at least, right?”

“Of course.” A smile bloomed on Ladybug’s face slowly, like a time lapse video of a flower. She stood up, fists raised like a boxer.  “Tomorrow. We’ll flood the wolf’s den.”


End file.
